On 30 Apr 2005 16:16:47 GMT, John Bokma <john@castleamber.com> wrote:

<snip>
>> So have you ever dealt with an ecommerce site like the above? Have you
>> ever dealt with an ecommerce site at all?
>
>Yes and yes. Your point is?

Care to share a URL or two? I'd like to see how you did the menu.

>> No, as above. Assuming you aren't playing your games again you've not
>> fully understood what I've posted in this thread.
>
>Yeah, Dave, that's it, games or I am stupid, or both Dave. Whatever
>makes you happy.

Sorry if I'm getting to you John, if you aren't playing games you
really should read things over twice before responding as we'll just
keep getting into these threads where you think I'm saying something
I'm not (seems to happen with every thread).

>>>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?
>
>Both. Are you now going to dig around for counter proof of the latter?

Why would I?

>I haven't done serious anything about that site for over a year or so,
>can't remember. It had a PR of 6, so I decided to keep it, sometimes I
>can make someone happy with a PR6 link. I removed some of the links to
>it, because I had better use for it.

So did it ever get any good SERPs?

I recall you saying that you don't need to use any SEO tricks to get
search engine traffic, that all you need is a site that validates and
good content and basic SEO (title, headers). I'm interested to know
why this site of yours isn't doing better with a PR5 home page that's
got a fair amount of text highly relevant to SERPs you'd like for this
sort of site?

You tend to use your personal site (PR7 home page) as an example of
good SEO, but as I've said before I think the little success it's had
is mostly due to the PR7 home page.

The SEO site of yours is PR5 (you said PR6 at one point) and so if how
you optimize content works wouldn't you expect to have some good SERPs
with it?

If you haven't got good SERPs doesn't that suggest it's due to what
you've done onsite doesn't work that well without PR7 links? Or maybe
you have another explanation?

BTW not all my sites do well, but most are doing well.

<snip>
>>>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)?
>
>johnbokma.com has currently 267 pages.

Not a big site though, any with 500+ pages?

>> index.php?Operation=CustomerReviews&ItemId=1932219 005&ampReviewPage=2
>>
>> The problem is the & in CustomerReviews&ItemId
>>
>> Do you know of a solution?
>
>Yes, I already gave it even some time ago the first time this problem
>popped up.
>
>http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/charset.html#entities
>the second "Note". Moreover 5.3.2. explains how to represent the &

You mean-

"&amp;" represents the & sign.

You do have a high opinion of your abilities and a very low opinion of
others. Don't you think I tried that along with when I changed
&ReviewPage (the original format) to &ampReviewPage (current format)?

It doesn't work though. Try it yourself by going to any page with a
"More Reviews" link at the bottom (most product pages) and
substituting &amp; for &.

So you don't have a solution that works then. Don't worry though, it's
not an important validator error, no chance at all it will effect
SERPs negatively.

<snip>
>>>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.
>
>I know, I never got to the point of linking the unicorn image back to /.
>At the moment most Perl customers land on my personal page, and click to
>castleamber.com. Both my personal page and my castleamber page are
>scheduled to be redesigned for over 6 months :-D.

So your personal page with a very good PR7 link to it receives ~3000
visitors a day, so how much does your business site receive with no
PR7 link to it?

The SEO Gold site doesn't have that many links to it (taking it
slowly), but recently (about 2 weeks ago) added a PR7 link from my
main literature site so should have a PR6 home page next PR update.
It's about 6 months since the domain was registered and has just
started to get it's increase in traffic (little earlier than
expected). For example yesterday it received over 600 visitors.

I'm interested to know how your stuff does when it doesn't have a PR7
home page?

>> The anchor text of your sites in general isn't optimized
>
>You are looking at the wrong sites. I think my anchor text at
>johnbokma.com is optimized here and there ;-)

I'd expect your business site (the one that keeps a roof over your
head) would be a little more important to you than your personal site!

>> 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.
>
>As you know, I focus more on perl programmer:
>http://www.google.com/search?q=perl%20programmer

Not a big SERP though, from Wordtracker-

perl programmers 25 21
perl software programmers 12 10
perl programmers seattle 6 5
perl programmer boston 3 3

The top one is perl programmerS and you aren't in the top for that. So
how many visitors a day does the perl programmer SERP get the site?

>> 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.
>
>I think we both agree that if I was absolutely rubbish at SEO I would
>not even come close to 1000 visitors on my johnbokma.com site.

I wouldn't agree with that, links are very, very powerful. Did traffic
start to climb after that PR7 link was added by any chance?

>I have
>links, because people were able to find me in the first place.

You told us the PR7 link is there because you submitted an image to
the site so they'd give you a PR7 link. When I checked your site out a
while ago the only high PR link was that one PR7 link for the image,
the majority of the others was mirrored NG posts and forum posts. If I
recall correctly there was only a couple of links that looked like it
was added 'organically'.

>>>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.
>
>Yup, I understand that. So having an additional home link on your page
>doesn't harm.

Depends on how you look at it. If I have a link to the home page with
Keyword1 as anchor text then I add another link with Home as the
anchor text this might harm the sites rankings for Keyword1. In the
sense of a penalty though having home as anchor text doesn't harm the
site like having hidden text might.

Is that what you were trying to say?

>Or do you think that if you link 10 times to home with
>different anchor text it's counted 10 times?

Don't know how it works to be honest. I assume the benefit is shared
between the links as if it was one link with all the anchor text
combined (or something like that). I doubt if you added say 10 links
to the same page it would count it like 10 links from different pages.

Would be interesting to test though.

>>>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.
>
>Oh, it is easy, that can be automated (a large part of internal linking
>on my site is handled automatically).

Not as easy as one static menu.

>
>> 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.
>
>As I already said several times, my site already goes to fast.

Not sure what you mean above by fast?

>I wonder
>when I have to pay extra for traffic :-D. My new design has more
>graphics. With going to 3500 visitors a day, a few kb extra does count..

Benefits of a dedicated server with 700GB of bandwidth a month is you
are unlikely to ever run out of bandwidth :-) In my experience of
using virtual hosting with a site with a lot of images and traffic you
can quickly run out of bandwidth when it does well. Before switching
to dedicated servers I was removing every character I could from
templates etc... and compressing images as much as possible (over
doing it) to keep within the bandwidth limits. Soon as it got to over
5000 visitors a day I had to move to dedicated.

>>>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.
>
>I can think of just a few, but that's in general.

Can you think of a good reason to use a framed site that can't be
achieved with a non framed site though? That's what I meant.

>> 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 :-)).
>
>Frames do validate, if you know what you are doing (right doctype for
>example).

Of course, notice the smiley :-)) above.

>> 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.
>
>Me too. I guess it was not clear that with small menu I mean a context
>related menu, not a small menu that's exactly the same on each page.

I misunderstood you then, thought you meant the same small menu on
every page. So it's a small custom menu on every page, which if done
with SEO in mind can be optimized to help the SERPs of most pages of
even a very large site.

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

SEO Dave wrote:

> On 30 Apr 2005 16:16:47 GMT, John Bokma <john@castleamber.com> wrote:

>>http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/charset.html#entities
>>the second "Note". Moreover 5.3.2. explains how to represent the &
>
> You mean-
>
> "&amp;" represents the & sign.
>
> You do have a high opinion of your abilities and a very low opinion of
> others. Don't you think I tried that along with when I changed
> &ReviewPage (the original format) to &ampReviewPage (current format)?
>
> It doesn't work though.

The ; is essential, as you could have read in that second Note.

e.g. &ampReviewPage is *wrong*, it *must* be: &amp;ReviewPage
The former passed a variable ampReviewPage *and* is invalide, so you didn't
fix the problem, and added another.

> So you don't have a solution that works then.

Yup, still the same: &amp;

> I'd expect your business site (the one that keeps a roof over your
> head)

The funny thing is, my personal site does that ;-)

> Can you think of a good reason to use a framed site that can't be
> achieved with a non framed site though? That's what I meant.

Yes, but only a few. And probably with the use of a lot of JavaScript this
can be reduced to less. (I am not talking about SEO, but the use of frames
in general). But my general opinion about frames is: very bad UI design,
use only if all other options are worse.

--
John Perl SEO tools: http://johnbokma.com/perl/
Experienced (web) developer: http://castleamber.com/
Get a SEO report of your site for just 100 USD:
http://johnbokma.com/websitedesign/seo-expert-help.html