If A Website Has To Much Content - What Is The Best Thing To Do??

[DYLAN]

Hi Guys,

I am working on a website at the moment. The website contains so much information that it becomes very diffcult to navigate to where you want to go and people get lost.

The only way around this I see is creating a Doorway Pages to handle the huge amount of content.

Can anyone please please offer any idea or suggestions to help people to navigate through the website????

The website that is diffcult to navigate through is:
http://www.informationcommissioner.gov.uk

[Anthony Parsons]

I'm not sure what doorway pages and too much content have to do with each other, but hey.

The easiest way to break up lots and lots of content is gather what's relevant into one group, then make those page step through from one another in a logical order for reading. This free's up trying to make individual pages all linked from a navigation bar. You only need to have the main focused content available for navigation, the rest can be step through from each page.

You can also break it up upon each major content page, into a sub-navigation system.

Include the lot within your sitemap for easy reference, and just make sure that is easily visible from all main content pages. If each page is optimized correctly, then each page acts as a landing page as such for the search engines.

[DYLAN]

Hi mate,

I think I now what you mean. Do you mean if a user types in a certain keyword then the page relating to that the page would automatically load up by passing the home page.

for example: If some one typed in data protection then the page containing the data protection would load up?

Do you have any other idea?

tHANKS

[Anthony Parsons]

What I mean is this! If you have a lot of information about data protection, then you could categorise that information into sub-sections of the data protection area. From your homepage, the only link you would have is to "Data Protection". On the data protection page, you may then run a sub-navigation to all the data protection information:

> Data Protection
> Security
> Vunerability
> etc etc....

Think of breaking up lots of content like how the average directory structure works. On the homepage you see a main category link, with maybe a couple of sub-category links. When you click on that category, you might then see 50 sub-category links. Those 50 links are not linked from the homepage. As you then move through those 50 links, you may then arrive at sub-sub-category pages. This is how you break large amounts of content up throughout a site whilst making it usable all at the same time.

The sitemap covers those search engine spider issues, whilst your navicable system compliments the user experience of the site.

If you have a page about Data Protection > Security, then that page should be optimised for its specific relevant terms, so when searched internally or externally, the correct page compliments the user search. Obviously externally in the engines, you then have to account normal SEO procedures to capture rankings or move to contextual advertisement.

[Chris Boggs]

Anthony if you had your rep enabled I would hit you up with a positive. Your advice is very clear.

As far as breaking up the data, I would suggest no more than 400 words on each page. The categorization system that Anthony suggests will work, especially with the addition of a site map.

As far as "the data protection page will load up," Dylan, that is not as certain. Most often Google will index the homepage as long as there is a clear path to the page you desire. This is a sore subject for some, and I can't find the forum discussing this issue right now but if I do I will post it...

[DYLAN]

Thanks guys,

What you are saying is correct. On the web page we do have a list of main catorgies, each one contains sub headings.

What do you guys think of flooding the search engines with doorway pages for the main sections of the website i.e data protection and freedom of information.

Is there no other way of breaking up the content so visotores can NAVIGATE more easily??

Thanks guys!

[Marcia]

Dylan, if they're legitimate content pages that are included in the site navigation and look like the rest of the site in appearance, they aren't doorway pages. They're additional content pages arranged a little better for usability purposes and ease of reading - and quicker loading time, also very important.

Most people find sites by interior pages, not the homepage. Hopefully they'll find the specific page that has the exact information they're looking for - that's the ideal situation.

[Chris Boggs]

Dylan, if they're legitimate content pages that are included in the site navigation and look like the rest of the site in appearance, they aren't doorway pages. They're additional content pages arranged a little better for usability purposes and ease of reading - and quicker loading time, also very important.

Very very right on..

Most people find sites by interior pages, not the homepage. Hopefully they'll find the specific page that has the exact information they're looking for - that's the ideal situation.

wondering about this...doesn't Google tend to provide the Home Page as a result as long as the content is down a clear path?

[Anthony Parsons]

Yes Chris, the homepage will be returned as a result if the content is relevant. What Marcia is saying, is that most of the time, the homepage is the lead into the site, where all other pages contain the detail of the site.

[Marcia]

Exactly, Anthony. And often it's the "details" that people will be searching for, so that's what they'll type into the search box at the engines. That means that if the "detail" pages are modestly optimized or linked to with anchor text, it's those pages that will be getting inbound traffic for the specifics. Plus, often those "detail" pages are less competitive, so they're easier and quicker to rank for. It's win-win for everyone, including the engines, since their goal is to serve up relevant results for their users.

[Mel]

...

Is there no other way of breaking up the content so visotores can NAVIGATE more easily??

Thanks guys!

If you use DHTML drop down menus (yes they can be spider friendly) you can provide a greatly expanded index to the interior pages of your site that enables the viewer go directly to the section they are interested in from any page on the site.

As a bonus if you build them right you can get a lot of anchor text links that way, which will even help the search engines direct your visitors more precisely.

[Robert_Charlton]

I'm not a great fan of drop down menus. On large sites, they're often used as an easy way out, in lieu of thinking through more intuitive navigation.

If your second level pages are named well, fishing around in the drop down subcategories shouldn't be necessary. I'd much rather send visitors to sub pages that head up divisions on the site and contain links and descriptions to pages in the next level down plus related pages horizontally. You can structure a linking page (actually, a mini sitemap) much better than a drop down list, with more flexibility of anchor text.

I also think you lose some control over PageRank distribution by using global drop downs, particularly on a large site. Assuming that not all the pages on your site are optimized, drop downs effectively put a global site-map on every page. While this can work well in a small site, drop downs on a very large site, particularly on the home page, can unnecessarily siphon PageRank off to pages that don't need it.

If Google starts filtering global elements, drop downs will also suffer.

I think on large sites a pyramid hierachical structure, with adjustments to emphasize deeper pages that are important, is better for SEO purposes... and if well thought out is probably as user friendly as drop downs, if not more so.

A good model, perhaps not for visual design, but certainly for user navigation and PageRank distribution, is the front page of Open Directory, where there are links to the most important third level pages right under the links to the second level... all from the home page.

The pyramid structure also forces a kind of a classification of pages that I think allows your pages to help each other in a way that drop down menus by themselves do not.

With global drop downs, you're generally linking to pretty much everything everywhere. I can imagine other ways of handling this. You probably could do the same thing with drop downs that ODP does with its home page links... and not make them global... but I think the expections for dropdowns are different, and that users generally assume that drop downs are consistent and include all subpages.

[Mel]

I guess it depends on where you put the most emphasis, viewers, ranking or PageRank.

Personally I feel that PageRank is hardly of any practical ranking use these days, though I do concede that it does have a certain prestige connected with it in the eyes of the public, and thus put the distribution of PageRank well behind the ranking of pages in my priority list. Certainly the ranking advantages of a well constructed drop down far outweigh any ranking advantages that PR distribution might provide IMO.

As far as the use of a secondary page versus a drop down menu with the same links, I fail to see any advantage in forcing the viewer to click to a secondary page before you reveal the links he is looking for, and many disadvantages when the viewer does not follow the route through the site that you have imagined he might, especially when he wants to backtrack to a previous page several clicks back.

[DYLAN]

Hi Guys, :)

Many thans guys for all your inpu, this great stuff you have been saying.

Robert can you explain to me please what is meant by pyramid hierachical structure? It sounds interesting and could work has I am working on a large website at the moment which you can view at:

www.informationcommissioner.gov.uk

If anyone has any more suggesstions to overcome the navigatational problems please let me know?

Thanks guys for your help

[Chris Boggs]

Isn't it a fact that it doesn't really matter if you have drop downs or not, from an SEO standpoint? If you like the look and it is easy to navigate for the users, that's all the better I believe.

A site map will direct any spiders through the site and provide the same categorization as the drop downs.

[Chris Boggs]

here's one example of my take on the pyramid heirarchical structure used for SEO... (ok I tried to attach a word doc but the pyramid was too big)

Top level of pyramid: Intro to site and Keyword
Text Links to important products/services

Next level: Sub Pages (based on each product or service) from Text Links with further Text Links to more supporting relevant information

Third level: “Sub-Sub” Pages with further information about each Sub Page (specific versions of product or levels or service). These Pages can then lead to even further information such as Reviews, Testimonials or Comparisons.

[DYLAN]

Hi Chris,

I am sorry to be a pest, but I still dont fully understand very well. Do you have an examples of website that offer this mate?

[Chris Boggs]

how about now that I spelled it out in the last post a little clearer (sorry couldn't get the diagram attached).

I will soon post an example of a site built like that which we didn't do, in order to avoid seemingly "tooting my own horn."

[Anthony Parsons]

Isn't it a fact that it doesn't really matter if you have drop downs or not, from an SEO standpoint? If you like the look and it is easy to navigate for the users, that's all the better I believe.

A site map will direct any spiders through the site and provide the same categorization as the drop downs.

Spot On! When the issue is just to big, go dynamic and as spider unfriendly as you need, and catch up in the sitemap. As long as the sitemap link is static from the homepage, and the sitemap links are static to all pages of the site, the rest is history.

[Marcia]

Mine have mostly all been structured like a "pyramid" since the first site I ever did - pretty much out of necessity because of the nature of the site and how it was set up when I took it on. It ended up like that because that's what I figure out to solve the problems that needed fixng; it was very workable so I've stayed with it.

But Dylan - if it's a government site they are *not* very likely to let you go ahead and tear their whole site apart, and completely restructure the architecture and navigation. And I seriously think that this wouldn't quite be the right site to practice on, doing it from scratch for the first time.

This is the original document on the theme pyramid with the diagram that illustrates it - where it was first put on line at Search Engine World.

Search Engine Theme Pyramids (http://www.searchengineworld.com/engine/theme_pyramids.htm)

Yours is not like an ecom site with money words to pull traffic in and convert to sales - it's a public service information site; so the rationale behind it isn't the same. It's more a matter of organizing the information so it's accessible.

There is no such thing as too much information - look at the immense amount of information in the Clickz network. Look at Microsoft's site. Look at about.com - or any of the big IT sites.

The discipline that relates to this is Information Architechture, by the way; and there are different models depending on the information needs and the audience.
=========================

Added:

First I searched for co.uk - kind of scary there for a minute. :) But look at how all these pages are showing up in the index - in the supplemental results. a different index.

Google search to see how it's indexed (http://www.google.com/search?q=site:informationcommissioner.gov.uk&hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&safe=off&start=50&sa=N)

It helps to leaf through and see what the site looks like when being crawled and indexed. With over 1500 pages in the index notice that a good number of the pages are not being fully crawled.

No matter what the file structure is, imho that's something that will have to be looked at first thing before anything else. Do all those pages that essentially look like duplicates there really need to be in Google's index?

[dstew]

The pyramid structure that Marcia talks about is almost all I ever do. The one thing I do in addition is to have more than one mode of navigation. I use tabs at the top, much like you have, as topics or groups of info. Each of these topics have their own tabs or links to smaller groups, unless they are not needed, in which case I go to the individual pages. In the tabs, I use DHTML, as someone else suggested, with links to the smaller groups, and in some cases individual pages.

Hope this helps!

[Marcia]

The left side navigation on the current site is actually pretty logical and easy to follow along with. If you look it, it leads to definite topical sections and then drops down to navigate to sub-topics within the major navigation topic heading links. So in concept, it's already got what was defined as "pyramid" structure, which served to give the structure an easy to reference "name" for what is actually a model of classic information architecture for large sites.

I see no reason to change the current site structure, which I find logical and user-friendly. The main thing is that there are technical issues that could be dealt with using URL rewriting, and the need to eliminate the duplicate content issue.

What's definitely needed, which I recently learned in some discussions on IIS url_rewriting is an issue with many dynamic sites, is to use absolute URLs to eliminate different file paths and names turning up for the same page when navigatiing to those pages from different places on the site. Those all show up in the SERPs and do represent duplicate content.

Then, while there isn't too much information on the site, there may actually too much information being fed to Google for indexing. Some of those minute detail pages may be necessary to have on the site for official reasons, but unless they'll be searched for at a search engine, those would best be handled through just an on_site search. As of now, they're cluttering the index a bit and could affect crawl patterns as well as PR distribution, and possibly dilute the ability to recognize which are the relevant, important pages.

[DYLAN]

Hi Marcia,

Sounds like rreally good advice - thanks. I am not quite sure what you mean by this:

Google search to see how it's indexed

It helps to leaf through and see what the site looks like when being crawled and indexed. With over 1500 pages in the index notice that a good number of the pages are not being fully crawled.

No matter what the file structure is, imho that's something that will have to be looked at first thing before anything else. Do all those pages that essentially look like duplicates there really need to be in Google's index

Could you please explain this to me. I tsounds like some of our web pages are not be ing indexed?? Is this what you mean??

Thanks Marcia

DYLAN