Thoughts on my site structure? (And a quick thank you!)
-
I've learned a lot through this site (and the community built around it) about everything SEO related. It's been extremely helpful in helping us help others to learn that all people (even those with a "disability") deserve respect and integrity. (Wow, that's a lot of helps!)
So I wanted to give a quick thanks to everyone on this site who has helped, supported, and encouraged us. We really appreciate it.
One thing I've been trying to do on my site is look at my categories and over all site structure. I've pruned a lot of things from the menu bar; pruned away and tightened up the categories, and even rearranged the navigation of the site. As you can see, I have several drop down categories up top.
I wanted to see if I could get some feedback on how what I'm doing looks thus far, specifically as it relates to my categories / menus / navigation. Although any feedback you'd like to provide would be more than appreciated.
One thing I'm curious about (and not sure how to tackle it) is regarding the top most item in the main menus. For instance you'll see I have a top level category called "Down Syndrome Resources" which takes them to all of the posts in that category. Under that, there is a drop down menus that gives them other categories, and even some pages that fall under the topic of Down syndrome resources. I'm not sure if people would know the top most item is a link, or just look at the ones below it. (If that makes sense.)
(On a side note I have therapy as a category as well as parenting, the truth is those could all be sub-categories I guess since everything on my site pretty much could fall under "down syndrome resources." Maybe this is a huge FAIL I made when setting up my categories.)
I'm also not sure if I should use some sub-categories as well. For instance I have a main category for Therapy. Under that I have posts about speech therapy, physical therapy, and occupational therapy. Right now they are all grouped into therapy. Do you think I should use sub-categories on those 3 terms, leave as is, or perhaps another option?
Another question I have is regarding landing pages. It seems like I need to have a landing page for my top "key words." For example therapy. Now if you visit my /therapy you get the category index page, not a "landing page." Same would go for the sub-categories if I were to create them. So I'm not sure if I should make a new post or page naming it something else (maybe "Down syndrome therapy" another named "Down-syndrome-physical-therapy" etc) or something else. (Although therapy isn't really the keyword I want to rank for, I'm thinking more along the lines of children therapy, pediatric therapy, therapy for children with Down syndrome, etc. So maybe I need to rename my categories? I was going for shorter names, so I very well may have done this incorrectly.)
All of these questions are things I'm not to sure about, so I'd appreciate any feedback or advice you can give me. And since I'm learning, I could be doing things wrong that I don't even know to ask. So feel free to tell me what you see that's wrong, you won't hurt my feelings. I promise.
Thanks in advance.
-
Hi Noah's Dad,
Great site, I'd not seen it before but I'm very impressed and take my hat off to you.
See what you mean about the top most item in the main menus, and I imagine a large percentage of people wouldn't know to click on "Down Syndrome Resources". There's two ways to tackle it.
The first option would be to have another link in the drop down menu with either the same name or "All Down Syndrome Resources". From a usability point of view I'd lean towards that.
The other option would be to try and highlight the fact that the top menu text is a link. By convention most people associate underlined text with a link, so my suggestion would be that when someone hovers over it (or the submenu) to underline the top menu text.
With having sub-categories for Therapy I think that's a great idea. If you had a smaller site with less content it may not be worth worrying about, but both for SEO and simply to make it easier for visitors to find what they're looking for I think that's the best thing to do.
For category index landing pages I wouldn't change the structure that you have, just spice it up a bit. Having a blurb at the top followed by posts is a good way to do it, but the introductory text that you have at the moment is a bit hard to notice. On http://noahsdad.com/therapy/ for example the headline is a plain 'Archives For Therapy' and then the text colour is medium-grey on a grey background so it's easy for the eye to skim past it straight to the first post.
If for that introductory section you have the text on a white background with a catchy headline and maybe a picture, I think that'll make a world of difference.
That's about all I can think of for now but if I come up with anything else I'll let you know. In the meantime if you have any questions please let me know and I'll do my best to help.
Cheers,
Bruce
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Could a redirecting a homepage mess with seo? if so is there any documentation you could point me too? Thanks!
I have a global page for our site but the global site has the exact same content as the main navigation personal page. If I redirect /index to /personal how much seo damage are we doing?
Web Design | | Miguelquirarte0 -
Retina Sites
What's the best way to make a site retina ready? Just code one site with retina resolution graphics or rather serve up two different sets of graphics depending on what comp is being used on the other end? Thanks in advance. I appreciate the input. Stephan
Web Design | | stephanwb0 -
How to correct error in customized posttype WP site
Hi folks Can anybody help me. I foolishly, dogedly followed a Lynda.com tutorial for developing an 'online portfolio in WP'. Little did I know that my initial assumption - to use the 'twenty twelve' rather than the 'twenty eleven' theme would land me in such deep water. I was attempting to learn php on my own. All went well, until, --- the index page for the customized post type. Now I have two beautiful customized posttypes, 'companies' 'coverage' and no idea how to create an index page for either. I can't do the next step! I have tried every permutation - changing the permalink settings, changing them back, desperately searching for any handle to the nebulous links within the menu section. The only thing I can do (and have done for now) is to link the menu item 'company' and the menu item 'coverage' to a single post. Then the poor visitor has to scroll through the posts individually. I tried contacting the tutor and Lynda.com, to no avail! I have searched forums and found this is a common problem, but because I am so confused and novice to php they might as well be speaking Chinese. To compound my problems, looking through 'Wordpress SEO' for Yoast, I am painfully aware I can't go to the first basic step and fix the peramilinks to 'Postname' as that just makes my flakey menu collapse like a pack of cards. Help!
Web Design | | catherine-2793880 -
Pagerank and SERP rankings downhill after site update
Our site underwent a major update in September 2012. We put the entire site in WordPress and did away with our static pages. Then, in February 2013, we moved our shopping cart pages from a subdomain to our main domain (in WordPress). In both cases, we had to implement a massive 301 redirect through htaccess as most of our URLs changed with the update. Our site consists of the shopping cart (WooCommerce), blog, and supporting pages. We noticed traffic starting to drop around the last week of November (2012) and it has steadily declined ever since. None of our shop pages have a pagerank with virtually all them showing a gray bar with question mark. Only the shop homepage has some pagerank -- that too from 4 previously to 2 now. Some of the words we used to rank very well for before, we don't even show in the first five pages anymore. At first, we thought it was a temporary situation that would self correct over time, but it doesn't seem to get better at all. All said, we have lost over 80% of our traffic from Google organic. Upon repeated reviews, the 301 redirects seem to be done correctly and we don't see any serious mistakes that could cause such a huge drop. So the question is are we missing something? Are we not looking at the right places? Any ideas where we might start looking? We're simply looking for ideas and a fresh perspective.
Web Design | | bizmanuals0 -
How to change the entire contents and design in my site without getting troubles with google?
Hello everyone This is my first post over here. In the next few weeks we going to change the entire content and design in our site. The site has 240 pages with poor contents and design. Except 301 redirects for all the old url’s I wanted to consult with you what is the right way to do it without harm my organic traffic that come from google? How google refers to this kind of changes? Which steps should I need to take to do it properly? Hope to get your help in the issue. Tahnks in advance.
Web Design | | JonsonSwartz0 -
URLs appear in Google Webmaster Tools that I can't find on my own site?!?
Hi, I have a Magento e-commerce site (clothing) and when I had a look through some of the sections in Google Webmaster Tools I found URLs that I can't find on my site. For example, a product url maybe http://www.example.co.uk/product-url/ which is fine. In that product there maybe three sizes of the product (Small, Medium, Large) and for some reason Googlebot is sometimes finding a url like: http://www.example.co.uk/product-url/1202/ has been found and when clicked on is a live url (Status code: 200) with is one of the sizes (medium). However I have ran a site crawl in Screaming Frog and other crawl tests and can't seem to find where Googlebot is finding these URLs. I think I need to: 1. Find how Googlebot is finding these urls? 2. Find out how to keep out of index (e.g. robots.txt, canonical etc.... Any help would be much appreciated and I'm happy to share the URL with members if they think they can have a look and help with this problem. I can share specific URLs which might make the issue seem clearer, let me know? Thanks, Darrell
Web Design | | clickyleap0 -
Testing your code and site
I’ve got various WordPress websites with the Share This social plugin for WordPress. I have been using Firebug and http://analyze.websiteoptimization.com/wso to do general checks on the site and the code. And used W3C validator too. Due to the way WordPress appears to work we never seem to be able to get all the firebug/ website optimization tests to pass and the W3C validator passes everything on HTML 5 apart from 7 errors with the Share This social plugin. How do you test your code/websites? Should I stop be a perfectionist and just be happy?
Web Design | | JohnW-UK0 -
Does Blog Look And Feel Have To Match Site Look And Feel?
For years I've run WidgetsAdvice.com as a standalone blog. It's done well, 4k uniques a day, 5PR site. But it's standalone. I recently purchased Widgets.com, which doesn't get much traffic and is only a PR2. To help grow Widgets.com, my obvious desire is to move the blog (WidgetsAdvice.com) over to Widgets.com and have it sit there as: www.Widgets.com/blog so I can get the good google juice to start flowing to Widgets.com Yes, I know it's important to do the page redirects properly, etc. That's not my question. My question is: Do they have to look the same? The page design of Widgets.com is very different than the blog. When I move the blog over, do I HAVE to make it have the same look and feel as the larger site? Does google penalize you if your blog has a different page design than the site it is blogging for? My preference would be to simply move the blog over and change nothing... maybe change the menus to point to the larger site, etc. But will google not like it looking different? (Widgets is obviously an example... my site name is different)
Web Design | | brianmcc0