Well as you might have noticed, the site has changed a lot today. We have totally reorganized the layout of our site so that all the navigation is done on the right hand side. Why you ask? Well, aesthetically, we like how there is more room for the actual content of the site, which is why you have come here in the first place. But through some research, I discovered a great practical reason for doing this.
I am starting to realize how important SEO (Search Engine Optimization) really is in this business. We still have very little traffic, and this is because we only get rare hits from search engines. Sure, we are on the front page of certain searches, but only with very specific or obscure terms at best. Keywords, as I mentioned before, are of utmost importance. They define your site.
Now, this doesn't really answer the question of what the practicality of switching the site all around is, but it plays a key part. To generate the best search results, search engines routinely "crawl" every site listed in their databases to process their relevance for certain key terms. Of course, deciding which web pages are most relevant to search terms involves a very complex algorithm, but most people agree that keywords play a huge roll. So, when the search engine crawls a site, it reads in a very particular manner. It begins with the title and headers, and then proceeds from the left side to the right, top to bottom. This means that if all of your navigation links other features are on the left side, a crawler will see these first and make erroneous judgments about your site. This is not something you want; you want a crawler to see your keyword rich content first!
So, if we ever do restore a left sidebar, it would contain keyword rich material, something that you want crawlers to see as soon as possible. Our tag cloud would be a good example of this. Right now, we are doing a lot of research about SEO, keywords, and getting your site at the top of search results, and we should have some valuable information in the weeks to come. I have created a new forum for discussion on this topic, so come in and discuss it with us!
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Nice post here Tim... you
Nice post here Tim... you are absolutely right when it comes to the importance of SEO. My business blog does ok as far as traffic, but that's because lately I've been concentrating my time on my other blogs... for example my Gamers blog, is currently ranked #1 by Google on many search terms, and I have to say, keeping it up there is not easy.
A great forum that I frequently visit, it's not an affiliate link, is http://forums.site-reference.com/.
I have gotten great feedback on what works and what really is just hype. Check them out....