On 29 Apr 2005 15:37:53 GMT, John Bokma <john@castleamber.com> wrote:

>> 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?

Do you really think I'm going to waste my time trying to justify this?
This is a newsgroup not a scientific journal, if I meant it as a
statistic I'd have included a reference.

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

That's the home page, click on a few of the deep content links like
this one
http://money.cnn.com/2005/04/29/reti...ex.htm?cnn=yes
(picked at random BTW).

Hover over the top menu and count the links. Way over 40, so the CNN
site supports what I said. You should have dug a little deeper before
using CNN as an example.

>> 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"?

So have you ever dealt with an ecommerce site like the above? Have you
ever dealt with an ecommerce site 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.

Never said you did.

>>>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.

No, as above. Assuming you aren't playing your games again you've not
fully understood what I've posted in this thread.

>> 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" :-)

Dead in the sense of no search engine traffic or dead in the sense of
you not marketing it anymore?

>>>"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.

You read it the wrong way then. No problem.

>> 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.

Never said you did use click here, it's just one more example of very
poor use of anchor text. Unless you are after the click here SERP of
course. As a side note I've had a few clients who have been after
SERPs that use the word home, so using home as anchor text can help if
that's one of the words you are targeting.

>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.

Or many more links to home if you like. That wasn't the point though.

>>>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).

That's a small site (67 pages indexed in Google) and so very easy to
create without any menu. Done any with a large site (at least 500
pages)?

If you look at http://www.classic-literature.co.uk/ you can see it has
a menu, but each section like
http://william-shakespeare.classic-literature.co.uk/ has it's own very
small menu (~5 links) linking to the home page and mostly related
pages. Considering the number of pages involved (over 100,000 pages)
this is about the smallest menu I could get away with and keep the
bots doing what I want and I had to use the iFrame to hold the book
page links to achieve this.

I don't think this would work so well with a relatively large
ecommerce site though, you need a reasonable size menu for visitor
navigation (seems to be the norm).

Had I not had to deal with the different pages of each book (some have
500 pages) I'd have probably had a menu with a list of all the books
in that section (all books by the author). A bit like the book store
menu here
http://william-shakespeare.classic-l...uk/book-store/

Speaking of which you never said what you thought the fix is for links
like the one below not validating for my book store?

index.php?Operation=CustomerReviews&ItemId=1932219 005&ampReviewPage=2

The problem is the & in CustomerReviews&ItemId

Do you know of a solution?

>> 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).

LOL if they agree with you they don't seem to mind as that site gets
plenty of quote requests.

>I also wonder if you don't overdo it a bit SEO wise.

That depends on your perspective, some sites I optimize the content
considerably others I barely touch it.

Nice way to avoid the question though ;-). So do you have an example
of a site of yours with a highly targeted menu?

>> 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.

Interesting. I'm using javascripted email addresses and also not
getting any direct email spam, like you just getting the info@ type
spam that's from the whois info or guessed.

>>>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.

I was looking at your search engine optimization site, though
castleamber.com also uses the anchor text home on it's own! You should
know from this NG that's very poor use of anchor text.

The anchor text of your sites in general isn't optimized and so only
the odd link is optimized by luck. For example you use the anchor text
"Castle Amber" for a home page link then text "freelance software
development" followed by another home page link with anchor text
"home" along the bottom of the page.

You are the 7th domain found for the search "freelance software
development" and not in the top 100 for "software development" if
instead of the above setup you have one link to home with anchor text-
"Castle Amber - freelance software development" you might do better.

>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.

Thanks to a PR7 home page :-) You should know off site factors are far
more important than onsite so if you have the links (which you do) you
can be absolutely rubbish at SEO and do well anyway. If you have the
links and good onsite SEO as well you do even better.

BTW how are the other sites of yours doing (traffic wise) that don't
have the PR7 link to them? That would give you a better idea of how
your on site SEO works.

>>>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.

Actually I said you don't benefit. You can add a "Welcome to my Home
Page" as a H1 header, it won't result in a penalty, but you've just
wasted an opportunity. Same concept with irrelevant anchor text.

>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.

Yes. Didn't say it was easy. The framed site where I did this had 30
menu files (I was young :-)).

I suppose it depends how badly you want targeted traffic. I know this
works better than a general all purpose menu on every page. I also
know it's not the only solution and as it was framed had major
drawbacks.

>>>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.

Of course, I can't think of a good reason to use frames. Like I said I
can easily do the same with a CSS design (or table I suppose) and a
single iFrame without the inherent problems of framed sites (will
validate as well :-)). Currently I have two framed site (ones a mirror
of the other) and both are in moth balls (not marketing them at all,
though still get about 1500 visitors a day between them). If I ever re
launch them I very much doubt frames will be used.

>>>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.

It was put links on the page to other pages using the same keywords.

>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).

When I did this with the framed site I also added a horizontal set of
links (not needed though) to the most important pages of the site for
an anchor text boost for the main pages.

>>>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.

Amazon's setup isn't too bad. If you click on the "Apparel &
Accessories" link for example you get a new menu with related items,
click on the "Women" link and another related menu pops up. It's not
perfect since the anchor text doesn't help every page (realistically
impossible to do), but it's far better than 40, 50 whatever number of
static menu links on every page of the site, so I'd be happy with that
type of menu for a site of that size.

>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.

I didn't say I had an ecommerce site with 40 links on the menu. As it
happens the site I've been referring to has 12 links on the first menu
(It's setup a little like Amazon's). I was talking generally, in my
experience when I come across a large shopping site there is a tenancy
for it to have a large menu. Also I've dealt with dozens of ecommerce
sites with thousands of pages and generally they have had large menus
(before I became involved).

I was asking what your experience is with large ecommerce sites where
easy navigation is essential?

>>>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 said "I don't see many" which does not mean none.

>
>> 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 :-).

Don't forget if you build it they will come (or something like that
:-))

>But when you don't use frames after some
>time it's clear that your page is called "untitled". A frame hides this
>fact.

Yep. Though a bigger problem is when webmasters use frames and don't
know how to get the framed content pages indexed at all!

David
--
Free Search Engine Optimization Tutorial
http://www.seo-gold.com/tutorial/