SITE DESIGN TIPS

Design a search engine friendly architecture

Part 3 of a 3-part series [Part 1] [Part 2]

Before you grab a free script and put up a new TGP2, create a model.SITE DESIGN TIPS

Design a search engine friendly architecture

Part 3 of a 3-part series [Part 1] [Part 2]

Before you grab a free script and put up a new TGP2, create a model. Think of all objects and components, their attributes, behaviour and interaction with internal and external objects. Use several perspectives to validate your model.

The most important perspectives are system maintenance, traffic management, search engine optimizing, infrastructure and security issues. When your model seems to be perfect, search for the script(s) to support it. Do not design your TGP2 based on given (free) scripts. By the way, I have not found a script supporting my model, so I had to write it myself. I’ll describe the search engine relevant modules of a TGP2 and ignore all other aspects.

Black arrows = links. Grey arrows = optional but useful. Do not build deeper than three levels including the domains root. Link to the root index on every page.

A spider will see the whole domain as your site. You have a lot of content (galleries and links) so you should show the spider that you have a content rich site. Make it easy for the spider to find your content. That does not mean make it easy for the surfer. But avoid tricky (hidden, invisible) links.

Think twice with every page and link you create:
1) Your design is for the surfer’s eye.
2) Your directory and link structure must fit the spider’s point-of-view.

Your domains root index page:
• Site logo
• Key word optimized description of your site
• Enter link to your main page
• Warning text (link “exit” to Google and click it once a day)
• Links to all your category pages
• Not so prominent link to the links list
• NO outgoing links!

Your main page:
The main page is a link and traffic hub (seen as a site map by the spider) and your money-maker. Try to optimize this page for both the surfer and the spider. The spider dislikes outgoing links and rewards inbound links. Due to the nature of a TGP2 you have lots of outgoing links, but you can reduce them with the following:

• Use ad management scripts to mask sponsor links, e.g. link banners to yourdomain.com/handleads.html?ad# instead of yoursponsor.com/tour.html?id#. Make sure the script redirects to a page on your domain when it’s called without parameters (most spiders ignore the question mark and everything behind). This kind of ad management is not considered as harmful redirect by the engines. To stay as safe as you can, use a cgi script instead of a URL looking like a content page;

• List your galleries first. If you have enough of your own galleries made from different templates, list only your galleries on the main page;

• Put a menu with links to all category pages above and below the gallery listings, and a link to the category page at the end of each listing;

• Don’t list too many galleries on the main page. Better to lead the surfer after a short gallery listing per category to the category page (where you’ve got a better chance to catch him with ads matching his fetish. It saves lots of bandwidth too). This also helps to increase keyword relevance. You should be fair to your gallery makers, so don’t prefix the gallery links with script URLs. Most spiders will not follow prefixed links to the galleries. They simply ignore the query string or the complete URL if it contains a “?” and/or a “&”;

• Trade votes/links and traffic here. You don’t need many external links to your domain’s root. A spider following a link to your main page will crawl the domain’s root too, even when you don’t link back to the root (which you really should do anyway);

• Don’t forget to write some rich text with readable sentences for the surfer carrying keywords for the spider.

Category pages:
The same goes here as for the main page. You cannot avoid more outgoing links because you list more galleries here. The gallery descriptions carry tons of keywords, and that’s good for you as long as these keywords belong to the same niche/theme. You should allow long descriptions to increase your content weight. Do not restrict the description length to less than 40 characters.

However, don’t list too many galleries. It is better to split the listing between the category page and the archive. If you can get votes from specialized sites and you operate a TGP2 with many categories, you should consider trading votes on category pages too. For example, when you trade links with a “black” porn site, use your ebony category page only or additional to the main page.

Category archives:
When you provide archives they must be categorized. Don’t make the link to the category archive prominent. When you skim here, do it in a way the spider can follow the links. Generally, archives are great spider food, especially as they can be used to feed your own galleries. The spider will never forget them even if they’re outdated. When your category archives become too large, split them into separate pages. Spiders will stop reading after a huge load of links per page.

Category traffic hubs:
This is the page all ads on your galleries of one niche are linking to. It reduces the amount of outgoing links counted on your domain dramatically. Here you can use pop ups and dialers which are forbidden on galleries before you send the surfer away to the sponsor (mask these links too). That’s a great technique to funnel outgoing traffic to maximize your profits (but that’s a marketing issue and not my theme here). The traffic hub links to a gallery index in the same hierarchy level as the galleries. You can use this page as a link target of ads on category and archive pages too (this possible link is not shown on the graphic above).

Niched gallery index pages:
This index is useful to loop back the spider coming from the traffic hub to your galleries, and what gives them more importance. If you don’t want surfers going to this page from the search engine’s index, implement a robots META tag, “NOINDEX,FOLLOW,ALL” and the spider will follow the links but will not include that page in the SE index. Also, post this URL (or a separate index page with links to all your gallery index pages) on the boards under gallery requests and use it in your signature.

Links List:
This page links to all free sites and AVS sites on your domain and only on your domain (again: avoid outgoing links). Making some free sites and AVS sites on your TGP2 domain is useful to get more listings in DMOZ and other sources of link popularity and traffic as well. Also, the spiders will find more content on the domain, which increases the importance of your site (content weight).

Free sites:
Re-use your TGP2 galleries. Create a warning page, instead of an ENTER button link to a few galleries and submit the free site to the links lists. The same goes here as for galleries. Don’t forget to make an index.html in the free sites directory. You’ll get more traffic and you increase your link popularity (at least from a few links lists). Before you submit to a links list, install the Google Toolbar and check its ranking. Do not submit to sites which are zero ranked or banned for cheating.

Gallery Submissions:
You link to many domains; some of them may be considered as “bad” or at least “poor” by the search engines (cheaters, most free hosts, etc.). Remember, outgoing links to these kinds of sites are penalized. Therefore:

• Do not accept free hosted galleries;
• Let your script create a monthly list of domains found in the gallery table, then check the page ranking of these domains with the Google Toolbar as described above. Remove all galleries on zero ranked (not new) or banned domains and ban the submitter if he cheats with the engines.

The best advice is to accept only partner submissions of trusted webmasters and to check their domains at least monthly. That’s a quality issue too, as you’ll lose visitors when you link to poor quality galleries.

Your Galleries:
Make directories in the root and name them properly for each niche you’re creating galleries. In these folders, create a directory per gallery and use the description as directory name and page title of the index.html.

Examples:

domain.com/ebony-sex-galleries/seductive-black-babes/index.html

domain.com/ebony-sex-galleries/splendid-ebony-beauties/index.html

or

domain.com/ebony_sex_galleries/cute_ebony_coeds_nude/index.html

Then create a gallery index page in the same folder. For example:
domain.com/ebony_sex_galleries/gallery_list.html

Link on this page to all galleries of that particular niche and the root.

Each and every gallery should contain at least a few sentences of keyword rich text. The spiders won’t see the text on your images (banners). Every image should have a descriptive ALT tag. Avoid keyword overwhelming as it’s penalized.

Write the text/keywords of the META tags matching the visible text on the gallery page and your content and the page title as well.

You must have a link to the domain’s root on each gallery page. This helps the spiders to find your TGP2 when they reach your gallery following a link from another TGP2. The best placement for this link is the copyright notice in the bottom line.

You must not put up reciprocal links to foreign TGP2s, ever!

If you’re a gallery maker and don’t operate a TGP2, adapt the domain structure to your needs. Make the root a links list or an AVS premium site (in this case, feed the AVS site with your galleries).

I’m not a search engine guru, just a webmaster with a little experience. Please don’t blame me if you implement stuff based on my hints and it doesn’t work – that’s your risk. As always: try – test – test again – approve – implement. And point me to my errors by using my email address below. Thank you for your time and best of luck.

Sebastian, a former managing director of a German business consulting firm, stepped into the adult industry in December 1999. He operates mostly AVS sites and a content shop at KremlPorn.com. You can find a frequently updated version of this tutorial at http://www.sexwithfun.com/tgp2seo/.