Ever see a real, live champagne tower? They look great, flow smoothly and get the party started in no time.
Allow me then, to make a very cheesy analogy: You should build your website like a champagne tower.
The tower is your site, the glasses are your pages and the champagne is that lovely link juice (Page Rank) that Google pours down our throats? Stick with me and I’ll show you how to build a great tower:
First, what can go wrong?
- Missing glasses. How will champagne flow to the bottom if you don’t construct each level carefully? Make sure that you get all the glasses in place (indexed) for the second and third levels.
- Too many levels and not enough juice. Why build a large site with many levels when you really don’t have enough champagne to reach the bottom? Virtuemart sites are particularly bad for this.
How do you make the champagne flow smoothly?
- Go get the Page Rank toolbar for Firefox. Browse around your site and see which areas lack PR. If they haven’t been added after the last PR update, those are weak points in your site architecture.
- Make the Section List and Category Table pages into center pieces of your site. Have one menu that links to each of them.
- Fill in all detailed descriptions for each Section and Category. Make them into a real destination for visitors and PR.
- Good sites start shallow. Stick with a relatively small group of sections and categories to maximize your link-passing power. Only add more as your site grows in age and PR. When you’re Amazon.com, then you can build a site 15 levels and still get your pages indexed.