SEO Dave wrote:

> On 29 Apr 2005 10:03:32 GMT, John Bokma <john@castleamber.com> wrote:
>
>>in in such a way, since it creates a nice interconnected network of
>>pages.
>
> If you know what you are doing it works very well indeed to use the
> content to link to other pages of a site.

Yup.

>>> The problem is when you have a site that the most obvious way to
>>> navigate is a detailed menu with a lot of links.
>>
>>I already explained why I don't consider this "the most obvious way".
>
> It is the most obvious way though and is why the vast majority of
> sites with a lot of pages have a large menu.

vast majority: can you provide us with statistics, or did you think it
sounded cool to make a point this way?

CNN has 14 links in the menu (and 7 under services which one can count
as part of the menu or not).

> Have you ever tried to
> deal with an ecommerce site of over 1000 pages where at least 200 are
> what you would consider department type pages and not used a menu?

Did I mention "no menu at all"?

> Fine 100 pages not that hard to create a site without a menu that

I never said "no menu", so we skip that.

>>So, in your own words: having a menu on a page, especially one with
>>links to related content is: very important.
>
> Close. Having related links with similar anchor text to the SERPs you
> are targeting on that page is important. A menu isn't necessarily
> going to always have related anchor text for ALL PAGES. The menu will
> help some pages, but for a large site in practice can't help all.

So you agree :-D.

> The ones in your sig and the search engine optimization one (the one
> with 9 links from the menu with generally poor anchor text for the
> bots).

You are clever enough to see that the latter is "dead" :-)

>>"the anchor text of a link is very important to the page". Does that
>>mean if you use "about" for a link, that you suddenly harm your page?
>
> I wouldn't use the word harm since that suggests a penalty of some
> sort.

Yup, but somehow I read that in your post, thanks for clarifying.

> By using anchor text like about, home, click here you are not
> helping your pages/sites SERPs (unless you want the home, click here,
> about SERPs?).

I never talked about click here, there are several more reasons why that
is a bad one :-D. And home can of course be linked to twice, once with a
logo + alt for example, or a text link that appears to be a logo.

>>Moreover, as I already wrote, I prefer to reduce a menu on a page to
>>related stuff. E.g. in a Mexican restaurant, even if they can cook
>>Dutch pea soup, I prefer not to see that on the menu :-D. (Even though
>>I like it).
>
> Do you have an example of a site you've done this with?

castleamber.com, although you probably wouldn't call it a menu, since I
was experimenting at that time with providing links in the content (from
UI point of view).

> So do you have an example of a site of yours with a highly targeted
> menu? If you look at http://www.seo-gold.com/ you can see the anchor
> text screams Search Engine Optimization, SEO etc... :-)

Yes, I wonder how that appears to potential customers. I consider it
very artificial, even a bit desperate (from a visitor's point of view).
I also wonder if you don't overdo it a bit SEO wise.

> BTW does using @ for @ help with email harvesters?

It did in the past, I haven't looked into it recently. The number of
spam messages I have got on that seo addy can be counted on two hands,
and I think most of those were sent to info@ sales@ e.d.

>>That depends a lot on your site. Quite some people will say that home,
>>and maybe more important. email are related :-) I think I call email
>>"contact", and on some pages I do have "contact me for more info".
>
> For the sites of yours I've seen it's not related.

I do get hits for email/contact john bokma, so to me it *is* related.
With home I agree, but if you look another time at my pages you see that
I took care of that. Remember, it's a personal page.

Moreover, I am now at 3000+ avg. I hope to get to 3500+ next month. So,
even with "newbie" SEO I am able to get a 10 fold visitor increase in 1
year. I think I didn't even double the number of pages :-D. Somehow I am
#2 for perl programmer, and I did get quite some nice "new" pagerank for
quite a lot of my pages.

>>But moreover, how is a menu going to help you if you put it on a
>>menu.htm page? In most cases, this page just consists of a lot of
>>links (you mention 40+). So I guess, that voids the advantage such
>>links could have in a page with real content.
>
> Covered that in the one of my other posts in this thread, see adding
> only relevant links from menu free pages.

You mean adding relevant links *to* the menu "free" pages. Yeah, ok,
that's an open door :-D. I still don't see the point though, you said a
bit up: you get no penalty for links with anchor text that is not
relevant to your target. Moreover, this would mean you have to make
several menu.htm files or you have some kind of "general" menu.htm, and
the related menu entries on the page.

>>Moreover, if, as I wrote, the other
>>pages in the frameset don't point to other pages, isn't that silly?
>>The latter happens a lot with frame sites (or otherwise, I see it a
>>lot).
>
> But someone doing something like this for SEO reasons wouldn't do the
> above, so that's another subject entirely. I'll never use frames again
> since there are much better solutions available, doesn't mean I
> couldn't use them to get very good SERPs.

But I think we both agree that in many cases frames are a bad idea.

>>Some are clever enough to add a link to the menu page (which adds an
>>additional level of indirection between each page)
>
> Not needed see previous posts.

I somehow did miss the explanation, unless it was: put links on the page
too. So you get two menu's, or somehow do what I do on my jb site:
related links in the text (actually under it), and some kind of
horizontal menu at the bottom (yeah, I know bad place from an UI point
of view, just wait a month or so).

>>I wouldn't use 40 links in a menu :-).
>
> Do you own any ecommerce sites with over 1000 pages?

Amazon.com has 54 links in the menu (counted fast, so might be off)
Note: I consider the "browse" thing *the* menu, and not the make money,
special features, and all the horizontal extra stuff at the bottom. When
I click books, Browse has 39 entries.

That you have a ecommerce site with 1000+ pages and 40 links in a menu
doesn't mean it's a rule, or that it's a good and well thought out user
interface concept.

>>Yup, I have seen quite a lot of pages that are used in a frame and are
>>called "Untitled". Or only use h1 in the header.htm (often with a ugly
>>big logo with "logo" as alt text, go figure).
>
> I don't see many of those since they tend to do very badly in the
> search engines.

Somehow I am able to find them :-D

> I don't think webmasters that use frames and forget to add a title for
> the framed content are using a framed site for SEO reasons though, so
> it's not like they understand the title is important to SEO.

But I doubt that they have 0 interest in to be found in a SE, I mean, I
find them using Google :-). But when you don't use frames after some
time it's clear that your page is called "untitled". A frame hides this
fact.

--
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