Information Architecture Question
-
I've got a site architecture / branding / SEO question for my own site (http://www.strikemodels.com/). In brief, the site sells kits and accessories for model warships that shoot and sink each other. My husband (Stephen) runs the business, and makes many of the parts we sell in our workshop/garage.
Stephen wants to have a section where he talks about the equipment he is building/ using, and give updates on each of the pieces. This is equipment we use to make products, not equipment that we sell. For example, he's building an EDM machine, and getting a plastic injection molding machine and an ultrasonic welder up and running.
We have a blog section where we post about updates about items that we sell, how to use our products, etc. This is more of a place for him to talk about what he's doing in the shop, and would also serve in future years as something he could point people to regarding his skills as an engineer if needed.
I'm looking for opinions and options as to where to put this. Is there a way to use a different category in the blog and have items in the blog show up under a different page if they're in the "Stephen's Corner" category? Other options would be a separate site just for that, or to do threads on the a forum dedicated to the hobby. I'd prefer to keep things on our own site to keep all of the benefits together.
Thoughts on structure or ways to make this work? Things I hadn't thought about?
Thanks!
-
one more test... please ignore.
-
test ignore
-
I am leaning towards using the existing blog and having a specialized category; it's nice to have that validated.
I think my next step is to see what can be done with WordPress and Thesis as they are, and then see if I need a plugin to make my life easier in splitting the blog entries over multiple pages or sections.
Any suggestions for favorite tools for using WP blog more as a CMS and less as a straight blog? The entire site as it is uses the WP framework -- the majority of the content is in pages, with just the one dedicated section (currently) for a blog.
-
I believe that most people who have a blog should stop thinking about it as a blog and instead use the blog as a content management system for posting short (or very long) articles.
The method of posting remains the same. However, the format of presenting to the visitor has an additional type of category page that allows you to move away from the chronological list and towards presenting in a format that prioritizes on the basis of popularity, profitability, usefulness or whatever you think is important.
Those pages might look like this... http://www.nytimes.com/pages/movies/index.html
Use your imagination and present your content with style.
-
Hi Keri,
I personally have done something simillair with my site. I have a ecommerce store and a blog for talking about our craft/skills. I put up a wordpress blog on a subdomain and done the very best I could to keep everything uniform so transitioning through sites you would not necessarily know you have changed URl's and the user can easily get back to the store.
Michael
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Duplicate H1 Question & Landing Page help
Hi We have 2 H1's on this page http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/heavy-duty-shelving Our webmaster has put one as display:none - but isn't this just going to look like we're keyword spamming & trying to hide it? OK now I;m looking I am seeing more wrong with this page... The width buttons at the top as h2's...& they link to facet pages? Won't this just waste crawl budget? and every product title/user guide title etc are all H2's.... I just need to put a plan together to give to our dev team on what should be updated Any tips would be great. Becky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Of the two examples of markup (microdata, schema) code below, which of the two is better designed for its purpose of Q&A, and what might be suggested to improve upon these lines of code (context: questions and answers within article content.
ANSWER SEEN 'WITHIN THE QUESTION' BRACKET So you ask, why is the sky blue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RedFrog
Well, the answer is not so simple; In the day-time, when it's clear and cloudless,
the sky is blue because molecules in the air scatter blue light from the sun more than they scatter red light.
When we look towards the sun at sunset, we see red and orange colours because the blue light has been scattered out and away from the line of sight. See Structured Data Testing Results 'QUESTION' AND 'ANSWER' IN 2 SEPARATE BRACKETS Why Is The Sky Blue? Well, the answer is not so simple; In the day-time, when it's clear and cloudless,
the sky is blue because molecules in the air scatter blue light from the sun more than they scatter red light.
When we look towards the sun at sunset, we see red and orange colours because the blue light has been scattered out and away from the line of sight. See Structured Data Testing Results Thanks, Mark0 -
Robots.txt question
I notice something weird in Google robots. txt tester I have this line Disallow: display= in my robots.text but whatever URL I give to test it says blocked and shows this line in robots.text for example this line is to block pages like http://www.abc.com/lamps/floorlamps?display=table but if I test http://www.abc.com/lamps/floorlamps or any page it shows as blocked due to Disallow: display= am I doing something wrong or Google is just acting strange? I don't think pages with no display= are blocked in real.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rbai0 -
Permalink question
For 5 years I have used the permalink custom structure: /%postname% without the end backslash. I didn't think the difference was that big of a deal, yet last month I was curious of what benefits would happen if I made the change. To my surprise my rankings took a slight dive, but recovered stronger than before. As the URL itself doesn't require a redirect the posts and pages loaded the same with or wothout the "/" But now in Open Site Explorer, all my URL's have no page Authority. All the links i built were pointing to links without the backslash: example.com/post-name Questions: Did Google figure out the change, hence the dip in rankings and strong return? Will keeping /%postname%/ even though many links are pointing to a non backslash URL comeback to haunt me? Is there anything I can do to help lead Google to better see the changes I've made? thx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MikePatch0 -
Robots.txt Question
For our company website faithology.com we are attempting to block out any urls that contain a ? mark to keep google from seeing some pages as duplicates. Our robots.txt is as follows: User-Agent: * Disallow: /*? User-agent: rogerbot Disallow: /community/ Is the above correct? We are wanting them to not crawl any url with a "?" inside, however we don't want to harm ourselves in seo. Thanks for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BMPIRE0 -
Removing Content 301 vs 410 question
Hello, I was hoping to get the SEOmoz community’s advice on how to remove content most effectively from a large website. I just read a very thought-provoking thread in which Dr. Pete and Kerry22 answered a question about how to cut content in order to recover from Panda. (http://www.seomoz.org/q/panda-recovery-what-is-the-best-way-to-shrink-your-index-and-make-google-aware). Kerry22 mentioned a process in which 410s would be totally visible to googlebot so that it would easily recognize the removal of content. The conversation implied that it is not just important to remove the content, but also to give google the ability to recrawl that content to indeed confirm the content was removed (as opposed to just recrawling the site and not finding the content anywhere). This really made lots of sense to me and also struck a personal chord… Our website was hit by a later Panda refresh back in March 2012, and ever since then we have been aggressive about cutting content and doing what we can to improve user experience. When we cut pages, though, we used a different approach, doing all of the below steps:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_R
1. We cut the pages
2. We set up permanent 301 redirects for all of them immediately.
3. And at the same time, we would always remove from our site all links pointing to these pages (to make sure users didn’t stumble upon the removed pages. When we cut the content pages, we would either delete them or unpublish them, causing them to 404 or 401, but this is probably a moot point since we gave them 301 redirects every time anyway. We thought we could signal to Google that we removed the content while avoiding generating lots of errors that way… I see that this is basically the exact opposite of Dr. Pete's advice and opposite what Kerry22 used in order to get a recovery, and meanwhile here we are still trying to help our site recover. We've been feeling that our site should no longer be under the shadow of Panda. So here is what I'm wondering, and I'd be very appreciative of advice or answers for the following questions: 1. Is it possible that Google still thinks we have this content on our site, and we continue to suffer from Panda because of this?
Could there be a residual taint caused by the way we removed it, or is it all water under the bridge at this point because Google would have figured out we removed it (albeit not in a preferred way)? 2. If there’s a possibility our former cutting process has caused lasting issues and affected how Google sees us, what can we do now (if anything) to correct the damage we did? Thank you in advance for your help,
Eric1 -
URGENT - How to Present New Site Architecture to Development team for implementation
Guys I am not technically savvy. I just want to know how to present the website architecture I want to be implemented on my website... how do I present my suggestions to the development team. For example.... Should I say. Page Level 1 - HOME Page (URL) Page Level 2 - About Us Page Page Level 2 - Feedback Page Page Level 2 - Our Services Page Level 2 - Contact Us Page Page Level 2 - Accounting jobs Page Level 3 - Audting jobs Page level 3 - Junior accouting jobs Page Level 2 - Engineering jobs Page level 3 - architecture jobs Page level 3 - Motor engineering jobs Page Level 2 - IT Jobs Page level 3 - Hardware Jobs Page level 4 - Job Post 1 Page level 4 - Job Post 2 Page level 4 - Job Post 3 Please guide me my fellow MOZZERS.... I really need an answer/guidance at the very earliest. Iwill be truly obliged Regards, Talha
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MTalhaImtiaz0 -
Anyone have an hour right now to cover some SEO questions
Hi folks, I need someone to Skype with me today, on some seo questions, for a multi wordpress set up I`m in middle of developing for franchise local sites. Will pay you $95 for the hour. Thanks Brent Sky pe me: cyberbrent (Brent H, Richmond, BC)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MenInKilts1