Navigation, Do NOT Forget the Navigation - Day 10 COWpetition

There are two main areas of focus that every blog needs to pay attention to…

• People –> Human visitors need to know exactly where to go and how to get there
• Bots –> The search engines bots need to no where to go and not go

The easiest way to do this… in our opinion, is to first create the site navigation, then once it is all done you go back and move it around to sort what goes where. To do this, you need to clearly understand what pages are important to get them ranked in the search engines and what pages are important for people but not for the search engines. For example…

• Non Money Pages (privacy, disclaimer and contact us): These types of pages are very important to have for legal reasons and also to help provide assurance to the readers but they do not need to rank in the search engines, they are simply on your site for anyone needing that info but having them rank in the search engines is pointless.
• Money Pages (sales pages and other monetized pages): These are the pages that you want people to visit, you want people to find in the search engines and are what you make your money from.

Because of the difference between money and non money pages, you want to ensure that all the “link love” that your site has, is focused as much as possible on the pages you make money on. This does not mean, removing links but instead just moving them and using the infamous rel=”nofollow”.

What this allows you to do is keep links visible to the human readers but for the most part ignored by the search engines (mainly Google) and vice versa.

Step 1 –> The first thing you want to do is to put the links to the disclaimer, terms of use, privacy and contact down to the bottom of the page, out of the way and remove any of these from the top and or side of the page. These are not pages that make you money, so you do not need them front and center but you do want them to be visible to someone looking for them. By moving these to the bottom of the page and adding nofollow to them, you are able to keep everyone happy

Step 2 –> Put a “Home” link in the top nav or sidebar with a “nofollow” tag. You are going to have to modify the actual template html to do this. This is important because you want a “Home” link for people to be able to clearly see how to get to the home page but you do NOT want the search engines using the word home as the keyword anchor text for your home page… unless of course you are Home Depot

To do this what we recommend is you “view source” of the blogs index page and then copy the html that is being used for your sites navigation. Then go into the template source code and modify the php scripting. So for example, the source code for a blogs navigation in the header.php by default will look something like…

<ul class=”menu”>

<li class=”home”><a href=”<?php echo get_settings(’home’); ?>/”>Home</a></li>

<li class=”about”><a href=”<?php echo get_settings(’home’); ?>/about”>About</a></li>

</ul>

and when the source code is viewed from the live blog, it would look like…

<ul class=”menu”>

<li class=”home”><a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/”>Home</a></li>

<li class=”about”><a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/about”>About</a></li>

</ul>

So what we do is delete the source code html in the header.php (if the nav is in the header) and replace it will the html but add the nofollow where we want it to be, so it would look like…

<ul class=”menu”>

<li class=”home”><a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Home</a></li>

<li class=”about”><a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/about”>About</a></li>

</ul>

Hopefully we did not lose you there

Step 3 –> Put a static link to your “link bait” page (do not use the nofollow for this link) beside your “Home” link in your navigation. So with the above example, the code in the header.php would now look like…

<ul class=”menu”>

<li class=”home”><a href=http://www.yourdomain.com/ rel=”nofollow”>Home</a></li>

<li class=”about”><a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/linkbaitpage”>Link Bait Keyword Text Here</a></li>

<li class=”about”><a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/about”>About</a></li>

</ul>

Part 2 - Call to Action

There are two things you need to do for your readers… the first is provide useful content… the second is direction.

This is really where the rubber hits the road in terms of a quality blog (in our opinion) and a “MFA” (made for AdSense) site. What we mean by that is, if you have a garbage site, that has no link bait, uses cheap writers or only unedited PLR, then chances are you’re not going to earn any loyal followers. People want quality… they want answers and they want help. If you can provide that, then you will gain trust, they will want to come back and you will be able to earn revenue.

To do this most effectively, you want to keep those loyal people updated by opting in to your auto-responder / RSS feed PLUS you want to make sure you are directing them to the most important area of your site at that time… that would be the link bait for the initial site. To do this there are two things you can do…

• Use the plugin Subscribe Remind (http://www.trevorfitzgerald.com/2007/03/subscribe-remind/):
  By using this plugin you give a pre defined message but the message is easy to see and is made to appear with every post.
• Create a custom message at the end of each post: Creating a custom call to action in or at the end of every post gets the readers attention when they are already interested in what you are saying. This is the perfect time to mention to them that they can learn even more or get even better results by signing up or visit your link bait page. Have the message directly relate to the content… if one post is about “fat burning products” on a blog more specifically about exercise, then having a generic “Learn more about exercise” is not good… but having something like…
  Click Here to learn about not only the latest Fat Burning Products but also discover fun and easy exercises, healthy eating tips and more by now

Personally, we recommend using both, this is the most effective because it covers all areas.

When ever linking to the Link Bait or RSS feed, especially when using a call to action with a term like “Click Here”, you should add the nofollow tag to the link. We do not recommend using a keyword as the link, a call to action phrase is much more powerful and effective.

Part 3 - Create a robots.txt

The robots.txt file is a file on your site that is meant to give instructions as to where search engine spiders may and may not go. This is not a wall but a permission system, which means that you can not force “bad” bots to listen to it. Bad bots are the bots that go all over your site but do not offer you any value at all.

The powerful reason for the robots.txt file is that it is listened to by the majority of all search engines and it helps to ensure that your site gets spidered and indexed properly. That means the pages you want to be found, can be found and the pages you want hidden will remain hidden.

We do not want to go into a long lesson on this, as there are loads of resources available on the topic that can be explained much better then we can explain them. What we will share with you however is that you want to use one and you want to upload it to the root directory on your server, located in the same place as your index page.

You can see the robot.txt we use at http://www.gamerzreviewz.com/robots.txt

Hope this post helps, hope you opted in to get more great tips and a chance to win some cool prizes and we hope you leave a comment about this post

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