By now you have established your niche, keywords, and have a good idea of the competition and keywords you plan to use to build traffic. If not, then go back to the website building article defining how to qualify your niche.

Prior to getting knee deep into website design we need to think about domain names, developing our site structure, and navigation, along with a few other preliminary decisions before initiating the site creation phase. Let's talk about them now.

Branding & Domain Names

Any website anticipating repeat visitors should be concerned with branding. Brand recognition and memorability is a critical part of marketing.

High value keyword domains are mostly gone these days. If you are lucky enough to find one for sale inexpensively keep in mind that the domain may have fallen out of favor with Google and the other major search engines. Take a look at the backlinks carefully using Site Explorer, and analyze the site content using the Wayback Machine if the site is recently parked. If you plan to include adsense in the site monetization phase, then check for problems with the domain using the adsense preview tool.

We favor .com tld's and no hyphens in the domain name for any site that will include a serious marketing plan and intends to establish a brand. The length of the domain name should be as short as possible with a maximum of 3 words.

Adsense
If you build an adsense site where repeat visitors are minimal then branding is not as important as including keywords in the domain name. So having a .com for this type of site is less critical. Stay away from .info domains because Google is reticent to even index new .info domains due to spammers using the $0.99 domains as throwaway black hat mechanisms.

If you do find an available domain with perfect keywords for your niche and it is a .net or .org just remember that the implied value of the domain is diminished when compared to a .com. The other thing to consider is if you do build a memorable brand people typically enter the name using .com for the tld so you could be sending traffic to your competitor.

Tiered Site Design

It is important to organize your website in a search engine friendly way.

Even more important than that is to create a site that isn't confusing to the visitor. It must be easy to identify where to go to get the information or product or service they are after when landing on any page on your site.

For this reason, we need to organize the site using a tiered site design that will eliminate confusion and enable visitors to easily navigate the site to find what ever they are looking for.

An example of this would be :

This example is abbreviated but should give you an idea of a tiered site design. It is easy to develop a site with a structure that is too deep (too many tiers).

Domains with high PageRank and authority sites are indexed deeper than new domains but new domains and those with little authority typically are not deep indexed by Google and the other major search engines.

Obviously, the home page of an online clothing store would not contain 4 links as shown above. Additional links by manufacturer would be included as well as links to second and third tier pages that are important keyword driven landing pages.

Keyword Focused

Designing a site using this structure enhances the ability to navigate by your visitors. It also lends itself to creating keyword focused pages. A keyword focused page will have a main keyword, with up to 2 additional keywords included that are related to the main keyword.

This will be discussed in depth later but a keyword focused page will contain the keyword in the url, page title, heading, and will be included in the body copy.

Pages that are related to each other should link to each other. Using our example above, a t-shirt sub page should like back to the main t-shirt page with anchor text "kids t-shirts", "childrens t-shirts", and other descriptive text that lends topical authority and link juice to that page.

Global & Local Navigation

Global Navigation is defined as the navigation links found throughout a website usually at the top or left sidebar of the webpage.

Local Navigation links are simply additional links that are relevant to the section of the website being viewed. So, this means that local navigation for children's shirts will be totally different than for children's shoes. All of the sub pages for children's shirts will share this local navigation pertaining to shirts.

Too many links on a web page is a bad idea. Try to keep total links to a minimum without losing visitor usability and navigation options. Pages with 100 or more links are too link heavy. Try to keep your maximum to 50 links or fewer with the fewer the better.

When you think your navigation is finished, a masterpiece, perfect...Pick a landing page other than your home page and try to find products or information related to the page but require navigation to other pages. Did you get lost? Did it require a high number of clicks to find the page? If so, rethink your navigation until nothing is confusing regardless of where a visitor lands in your website.

Once you can do it, ask someone who has never seen your site to do the same thing...


Ranking
Our discussion about ranking your website comes later, however, part of the puzzle must be discussed now. It takes more than links and choosing the right keywords to rank in a competitive niche. Especially with Google.

Google's quality guidelines are all about relevance and utility. The link references a more detailed discussion about this but for this article the key thing to focus on is quantity and quality of content regarding the keyword.

If your competition has an entire section of their website dedicated to your keyword and dozens of pages providing information about it, then you can't compete with a paragraph or single page no matter how well optimized it is. For this reason you must evaluate how detailed the online discussion is on the top ranking sites and compete with them in quality and quantity metrics.

Indexing & PageRank

Google has become a powerful juggernaut of a search engine. They spider javascript, are working towards deciphering Flash, and identifying / classifying images as their technology advances.

That said, textual content and static html hyperlinks are critical to proper site indexing, identification of topical relevance, and ultimately, to some extent, distribution of PageRank from one page to another within a website.

Navigation links are useful for indexing purposes but text links within your content from one page to another using the proper anchor text is a critical function of seo web design. As your content allows, always link related pages within your content to pass juice and topical relevance.

Website Building Basics
The next article in our series discusses the basic concepts to keep in mind when actually creating the website. We also discuss the potential needs a website may have and the impact your hosting decision can have associated with those needs.

Return to Website Building Series

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