The Recent Changes to Our Blog Navigation and Setup
July 7th, 2011 by Will Franco aka Flywheel
In this post, I talk about the changes I have made to our blog and how they will improve our rank in the search engines.
We’ve been pushing really hard for search engine rankings, and it’s been paying off. We’re currently result 2 in Google for “video email marketing“, result 5 for “video email software“, and result 10 for “video email“, and we are rapidly approaching number 1 for all these results.
Updates Made
- Removed Banner Ads – I removed all the banner ads from our pages because they create a leak in pagerank and therefore our position in the search engines. I moved our banner ads to a page that is called “Stuff We Recommend“, which has a very different impact on both perception and the way page rank flows. Banner ads show globally (on EVERY page) on most themes. Each banner you have on your blog is basically one outbound link for each page they’re on. That’s a lot of outbound links, folks. The Google Panda update also adds fuel to the fire when it comes to banner ads, as it is believed the new algorithm doesn’t take fondly to sites with lots of banner ads, potentially because it is an indicator of an affiliate site.
- Relocated Categories – I moved our categories from horizontal (across the top) to vertical (on the right sidebar). I read an article that talked about how we sort information better when it’s vertically laid out, as opposed to horizontally.
- Added a Tag Cloud – I added a tag cloud underneath the new vertical category display that shows the most used tags. In the past, I’d tag our posts appropriately, but they didn’t really do anything for anyone because no one saw them. Now, with the visual tag cloud, we hope that it will aid in the navigation of the blog.
- Re-categorized Posts – I filed all our content differently, reducing the amount of categories and making posts easier to find.
About the Author:
Will Franco is the CEO/Founder of jiveSYSTEMS (a video email marketing software and training company). He also runs an online community / membership group called AskFlywheel, in which he teaches cutting-edge online marketing strategies. His mantra at work is "Think-Automate: Do it, Automate it, Delegate it, or Ditch it"
