Site Architecture Issues & Comments

Some words of wisdom followed by questions of how to consider them on the time4learning site.

"The homepage is generally considered the most important page of a site - it is the top level document and usually attracts the most inbound links. From here, search engine robots can normally reach pages that are within three clicks of the homepage. Therefore, your most important pages should be one click away, the next important two clicks away and so forth.
" - quoted from entireweb & Craig Broadbent - see below

But, on my site - many critical pages such as HomeSchool Curriculum or Special Needs Learning are two steps from the homepage (at best) via the sitemap. There are 13 links from my home page to the following pages. NONE of these pages reachable from the first page are SEO-optimized page.

2x MemberLogin - PR5
1x Privacy Policy - this link has a https link. As a plain http page, its PR5 Learn More - http://www.time4learning.com/Start/page2.htm - FreeLessons demos - PR3
Learn More - http://www.time4learning.com/start/page3.htm - oldstyle demos - PR2 2x
Sign Up - https://www.time4learning.com/alpha/Signup_Parent_Information.aspx
Sign Up Now - https://www.time4learning.com/alpha/Signup_Parent_Information.aspx
Try It, Risk Free - www.time4learning.com/alpha/Signup_Parent_Information.aspx
Start Helping My Children Now - ~/alpha/Signup_Parent_Information.aspx
Homeschooling - http://www.time4learning.com/homeSchool-online.htm - PR4 SiteMap - http://www.time4learning.com/siteMap.htm PR5 Contact Us - http://www.time4learning.com/contactUs.htm PR5 Internal Links -

"The next thing to consider is how to link the pages together. Search engine robots can only follow generic HTML href links, meaning Flash links, JavaScript links, dropdown menus and submit buttons will all be inaccessible to robots. Links with query strings that have two or more parameters are also typically ignored, so be aware of this if you run a dynamically generated website. " quoted again from Entireweb & Broadbent

SiteMap - How important? So, here are some questions which I would like to find answers to. I'd particularly like to find a combination of SEO / marketing expertise that will help me figure out how best to write for both my human and Araneidae visitors.

Specifically: 1. Should I put a few links to my key (for SEO purposes) pages on the front page? But, I generally want my visitors to follow the "learn more" buttons, not go wandering thru all my internal pages. In fact, I'm about to reduce the prominance of my sitemap link. - check out http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html#internal_linking 2. Should my links to non SEO'd page be put into a format that will not be crawled? If so, how would I do that? Since I don't know how to do it, I have tried to put internal links onto all the pages reached from the home page so that they function as a sort of sitemap. Example: look at the links on: http://www.time4learning.com/contactUs.htm http://www.time4learning.com/alpha/Policies.aspx

Original article sent by entireweb - written by : Craig Broadbent is Search Engine Optimisation Executive for UK-based internet marketing company, WebEvents Ltd. Clients of WebEvents benefit from a range of services designed to maximise ROI from internet marketing activities. To find out more, visit http://www.webeventseurope.com/.