 Hey everybody, what's going on? Welcome to Wednesday, Wednesday the 7th. Do I have that right? Yes, 7th of January 2022. Goodness gracious. Time is flying. Good to see you guys. Hope you're all healthy and happy and doing well. And today we're going to talk about, what are we going to talk about today? Does anybody know? Does anybody know what we're talking about today? We're talking about site structure and building websites. The reason I'm doing this today guys is that I'm actually building another website. Okay, so since I'm doing that I figure I'd go ahead and talk about some of that stuff and what's going on with it. I'm trying to let's see here, get my screen clear. Let me know that you can hear me guys. Let me know that you can hear everything okay and that it's coming clear to you and I'm trying to straighten out my screen here. I just bumped something and it showed me all kinds of other stuff and I don't want that. Let me see here. I just want a classic. Okay and I think that is all I need here. Oh, I bumped the wrong tab here. Okay, I'm back on comments now. Hey guys, if you're new here, stay true here. Do be a favor. Click that subscribe button down there. Turn it from red to gray. Don't forget to ring the bell. Turn all bell notifications so you're notified each and every time I go live and you are notified when I upload a video or if I'm live. So make sure you do that. Today we're going to talk about site structure. I'm going to walk you through everything you need to know about site structure guys. This is so very important. If you're starting a website, if you've already got a website, you can use a lot of this stuff to help you out to make your website more usable for the person okay and you know I mean you've got to kind of ask yourself why is this site structure so important? Well it's really important because of usability and functionality. Many sites lack a sound structure to guide visitors to the information they're looking for. Having this clear site structure also leads to a better understanding for Google so that Google can find you and send people to you. So it's incredibly important for your SEO and usability. The structure of your site really can have an impact on the user experience or as we call it UX okay. If visitors can't find the products and information they're looking for, it's not very likely that they'll become regular visitors or customers for that matter. In other words, you should help them navigate your site okay and that's what we're going to talk about today. I'm going to give you a roadmap to do that just so you know I'm also live on Friday and I'm also live on Saturday. So we've got three more sessions this week not to mention I have live videos coming up not live videos excuse me uploaded videos every Monday Wednesday and Friday so you'll want to check that out too. Navigating should be easy okay. You need to categorize your link in your post and product so that they are easy to find. New visitors should be able to instantly grasp what you're writing about or selling okay. So the importance for SEO a solid site structure will really improve your chances of ranking and search engines. There are three main reasons for this okay. Let me talk about these because these are so important to Google. It helps Google understand your site okay. If Google can't understand your site if they don't get it they're not going to show it to anybody okay. The way you structure your site will give Google vital clues about where to find the most valuable content on your site. So Google's trying to figure it out just like a user coming to your site is. It helps search engines understand your site mainly about what you're selling, what you're doing, what you're trying to get across. A decent site structure also enables search engines to find and index content quickly which is what you want to do. A good site structure should therefore lead to a higher ranking in Google. So it's not direct it's kind of indirect but nevertheless it's still there. Let me get another sip. So since I'm building a site right now and it has to do with my restaurant quality recipe channel I have to worry about that okay. So on your site and I'm going to say number two it prevents you from competing with yourself okay competing with yourself which sounds crazy but this is going to happen. On your site you may have blog posts that are really similar okay. So for example you write a lot about let's say SEO. You could have multiple blog posts about site structure even covering a different aspect of it. Consequently Google won't be able to tell which of these pages is most important so you'll be competing with your own content for a higher ranking on Google which sounds crazy but it happens. You should let Google know which page you think is most important. You need a good internal linking and taxonomy structure to do this so those pages can work for you instead of against you because it can actually work against you you can be competing against yourself it's crazy. The third thing is it deals with changes on your website. The products you sell in your shop likely evolve over time. So does the content you're writing that's what you got to say that has to also change all right. You probably add new product lines as old stock sells out or you write new articles you make new ones that are redundant you don't want Google to show outdated products or deleted blog posts so you need to deal with these kinds of changes in your site structure okay. So that's what you need to do okay to get it all set up now how to set up your site structure okay this won't go and talk about real quick because this is what it's all about and there's just a few things you need to do. So how do you construct a solid site structure first I want to look at an ideal site structure and then I want to explain how to achieve this on your site okay. So an ideal site structure now let's start looking at maybe the ideal situation okay. If you're starting from scratch how should you organize your site okay. I think a well organized website looks something like a pyramid with a number of different levels okay. So the first thing you got is your home page this is the main page people go to and they start to navigate from this page so that's number one there's only four of these there's only four. Number two is your categories or sections okay so you have to set up your categories or sections okay and then next is going to be your subcategories and this is only for larger sites but let's say you have subcategories and then number four is going to be your individual pages and posts so that's basically you know what you're going to be going through. Who do you prefer to host your website let me get a sip here. Paul that's a great question I could probably better answer that with who I don't want to host my website or build my website at me because you got two different things you got hosting and you've got actually you know you know where I guess the platform you're going to use to build your website I don't like a lot of these snap together platforms like Wix or Google I don't like those it's not to say they're bad you just can't really grow with them and and I'm hopefully everybody's listening plans on growing. I use a hosting company called Nexus and the reason I use Nexus is because I have different types and different levels of hosting that I need so I have a Magento site and I also have WordPress sites so Nexus can handle all of that if I were to only have WordPress sites I would say Bluehost and the reason I say Bluehost is number one I'm an affiliate but that's not really number one the main thing is Bluehost is the preferred hosting for WordPress and since it is I got to figure it's probably one of the best ones so I would say Bluehost is my number one pick if I if I was forced to pick one I hope that answers your question there a home page guys and we just talked about this should be all the way at the top okay that's the top of your pyramid then you have some sections or category pages beneath it you should be able to file all your content under one of these categories so set up a few categories and put all your content under at least one of them okay you should be able to set it up that way if your site is larger you can divide these sections or categories into subcategories as well beneath your categories or subcategories are your individual pages and actual posts so like on survival cave food if you click can't meet you're going to come to a page that has canned meats and then it's going to take you to a page where it has 28 ounce and 14 and a half ounce and then below the 28 ounce you're going to find a beef chicken turkey pork and ground beef same thing under the 14 and a half ounce and then you're going to have different combinations six cans 12 can mixes full cases different things like that so that's kind of an example of what we do on top of your pyramid is this home page okay this means among other things that you should link your most important pages from your home page okay by doing this your visitors are more likely to end up on the pages you want them to end up on you show google that these pages are important further down in today's training i want to help you determine which of your pages are essential business pages beware not to try to link too many pages to your homepage because that will cause clutter so you've got to you can't do it all you know i see people say well i want to rank for 500 keywords you can't do it you can't do it it's not possible next thing i want to talk about here is navigation navigation is so very important and i see so many sites that are difficult to navigate having a well-structured homepage it's also important to create a clear navigation path to your site your site wide navigation consists of two main elements the menu and breadcrumbs that's it okay so let's talk about the menu first um the website menu is the most common aid for navigation on your website and you want to make sure it's the best possible use of it visitors use your menu to find things on your website it helps them understand the structure of the site that's why the main categories under your site should have all one place under that homepage furthermore it's not always necessary to put everything in just one menu if you have a really large site okay lots of categories this may clutter your website and make your main menu a poor reflection of the rest of your website where it makes sense it's perfectly fine to create a second menu okay you can do that for instance ebay um has one menu at the top of the page also called the top bar menu and in addition to that a main menu the top bar menu links to important pages that aren't categorized in the shop like pages that had to do with the visitor's personal account on the site you know terms and conditions that type of thing the main menu reflects the most important product categories on ebay finally like on your homepage you shouldn't add too many links to your menu if you do they will become less valuable both for your users and for search engines so you know we're trying to hit two things at the time we're trying to hit the users and search engines let's talk about that breadcrumb trail you can make the site structure even cleaner by adding breadcrumbs to your pages breadcrumbs are clickable links that are usually visible at the top of the page or post breadcrumbs reflect the structure of your site they help visitors determine where they are on your site they improve both the user experience as well as SEO of your site as you can read in many of these blog posts out there they'll tell you all about breadcrumbs if you use a WordPress site you can use one of the many breadcrumb plug-ins that are available you can also use Yoast SEO plug-in and I just put Yoast SEO plug-in on the website I was working on last night and I love it the next thing is taxonomies okay what is that okay web press uses a so-called taxonomies to group content okay so other CMS or content management systems often have a similar system the word taxonomy is basically a fancy term for a group of things web pages in this case that have common things in in relation to each other this is convenient because people looking for more information on the same topic will be able to find similar articles more easily you can group content in different ways and the default taxonomies in WordPress are categories and tags so let's break down categories and tags Paul's going to come in here let's see what it says on a site I like the idea of having links to other links like Facebook LinkedIn and others above the fold thoughts on this best use or odds clutter or ads clutter this you know my thought used to be Paul if you were to ask me this five years ago I would have said have those prominent and at the top of your website but after years of looking at data after years of seeing what people do after looking at you know heat screens and seeing what happens I would say don't don't have them above the fold if you have them above the fold think about the reason you would do that the reason you would do that is to get people to click on them correct well what you're essentially doing by having them click on them is leave your web page okay so by putting all of these social media things at the top of your web page you're actually having them leave whatever they came to your web page for so let's say they came to our survival food site and they're there to buy some products and they look up and they see that we have I don't know a YouTube video and they're going to go up to YouTube and start watching videos and they may never come back and buy that product so my thinking has changed and evolved okay as it does with most politicians but I believe that all those things are important to provide to your customer but not to distract your customers so for that reason I believe you should put them at the bottom of the page now where if they're looking for them they can go find them see because if they're looking for them they're planning on leaving anyhow but if they're not looking for them and you put them at the top of the page they will leave and not do the things you want them to do which is stay on your website so that's my thinking on that and of course I'm sure I have people who conflict with my theory but it does work very well uh next up categories you should divide the blog post or your products or whatever it is into a number of different categories if these categories grow too big you should divide these categories into subcategories to clear it up all over again for example let's say you have a clothing store and you sell shoes you can decide to divide this category into a number of different subcategories maybe you have boots maybe you have heels maybe you have flats all of these subcategories contain products and in this case shoes of that specific type now adding this hierarchy and categorizing your pages helps your user and google makes sense of every single page you write when implementing your category structure make sure to add your main categories to the main menu of your site next thing I want to talk about is tags tags are immensely important and that's the one thing that a lot of people leave out I'm gonna give you another sip here real quick but Paul let me know if that answers your question tags your site structure will also benefit from adding tags the difference between a category and a tag mostly has to do with structure categories are like a hierarchy and you can have subcategories or even sub subcategories if you wanted tags however don't have that hierarchy there is no hierarchy tags just say hey this article or this product has certain property that may be interesting to a visitor so if I have a can of beef I may put canned beef okay because people are looking for that or long-term canned meats okay those are tags and that helps people categories are a table of contents of your website and tags are the actual index a tag for an online clothing store mentioned above what I just talked about could be a brand for example like let's say Timberlands okay now try not to create too many tags that's where people go off now I would say the only exception to that rule is on YouTube where they allow you to have up to 500 characters I believe it is and I use up all of those but on your website you don't want to have too many because Google won't know how to index that okay but on YouTube people are searching for particular terms if you have that term on your video they'll go to it it doesn't have anything to do with indexing so that has a lot to do with it contextual internal linking that sounds like a fancy thing doesn't it well it's not site structure is all about grouping and linking the content on your site until now really all I talked about today is classifying links links on your home page links navigation taxonomies that type of thing contextual links on the other hand are internal links within your copy and your pages that refer to other pages on your site so I may have a description of canned meat in there and then I may mention canned chicken may have a link that goes over to the canned chicken for a link to be contextual the page you linked to should be relevant for somebody reading the current page okay so if they're reading a blog on my site about how to protect your home from burglars a link in there should have something to do with how to protect your home whatever it is a course a downloadable whatever it is your most important pages are probably often very relevant to mention on several pages across your site so you'll link to them most often just remember that not only the page you're linking to is relevant the context of the link is important as well so google uses these context of your links to gather information about the page you're linking to it always use the anchor text or link text to understand that page now contextual linking for blogs for blogs you should write extensively on the topics that you'd like to rank for okay so think of it that way don't be all over the place with these blogs you should write some main articles your cornerstone articles and write various posts about subtopics of that topic then link these related posts to your cornerstone articles and from the cornerstone articles back to the related posts in this way you'll make sure that you most of your most important pages will have both the most important links and relevant links okay i know that sounds a little complicated but i hope you understood that adult add moment cool shirt oh thank you yes i am i am supporting my uh deposit that i put on a truck oh god has it been four years i think it's been four years ago tesla truck uh love to pick it up it's not ready yet but he has my deposit which is not a big deal it's not a lot of money um let's see he calls got some good stuff here what what will you offer a restaurant foodie site um will you have a lead magnet to build a foodie list you know i don't know yet paul that's that's a great question um i know there was a restaurant that's opening uh in cedar park um california and i saw that they're opening it and they have several other locations and i was um communicating with the owner of that place today so i may actually do some in restaurant um videos i have a bunch of videos to go up uh unfortunately my video editor is ill his wife's ill and they have a i think a two-year-old let me get a sifter so he's a little behind on editing i've got about six videos stacked up for him to get on my restaurant channel but i don't know there's so many good ideas about that paul and that is a good one a foodie list is a really good one a great answer to my question thanks will you do paid advertising on your new site will you have a facebook page too uh the answer for the paid advertising is i don't know um i'm leaning towards no uh because it makes it look too commercial but i'm not going to rule it out i'm not going to rule it out uh and i already have a facebook page but it's not live yet so i've got to get all these things interconnected uh and i also got to get the website built it's it's a big undertaking to do this guys to start a new channel because when once you start a channel on youtube you've got to have the web page you got to have the twitter you got to have the instagram getting all these things and i don't have all that set up yet so i am working on that bear with me on that uh cool good stuff there paul appreciate it um contextual linking opportunities for online shops um i want to talk about this for a second um contextual uh internal linking works different with an online shop with a very few to no pages that are exclusively meant to inform you don't explore a specific topic on your product page you're actually selling a product okay so that's different therefore on a product page you mostly want to keep people on a page and convince them to buy the product and that's why i went back to all that social media stuff i don't want to send them away okay uh consequently contextual linking is far less prominent in this context you generally shouldn't add contextual links to your product descriptions because it could lead to people clicking away from the page so although it may get you more people coming to the site or getting people to stay on your site longer it will lower your sales overall so don't put these links in your descriptions of your products you want a link from a product bundle page to individual products you can do that um you want to maybe go to a related items or compare with similar items section you could do that um you may also want to have an amazon does this really well customers also bought section you may want to have that on there uh a product bundles are frequently bought together section um so those types of things true landing pages and i'm i'm running out of time and i've got tons of more information so i don't know i'm going to run for probably a touch longer um but uh i don't think i'm going to get through everything so the landing pages are the pages you want your audience to find when they search specific keywords you've optimized for for example we want people to search for let's say free seo training and end up on the page about free training called seo for beginners you need to approach the content of most important landing pages differently than your other regular pages okay this is a whole different thing guys um so let's let's talk about search intent when setting up your site structure you need to link about search intent it's about what you think people are looking for when they enter a query into a search engine but you can figure this out by looking at the google keywords well you can find out what they're looking for take time to think about the different possibilities in the search of intent you may want to cater to different types on your site that may be something you want to do some of you may not want to do that uh so we've got another comment here how does consistent content on a regular scheduled basis affect ranking versus being inconsistent will you do instagram shorts i don't think i will do instagram shorts just because of a time issue i will probably be posting on instagram recipes though and pictures of those recipes that will certainly be there um and consistent content well that's just a given um that's a given on youtube it's a given on facebook on instagram on and google in general um the more consistent you are the more they're going to push your content out you know if if i were to do let's say four videos this week and post all four videos um and then not post for another 30 days and then post four videos and not post for another you know four excuse me four weeks and in other words i only post four videos a month but i post them all within one or two days i am going to do worse than if i post one video week every monday for a month same about a content but the consistency is there so when you're thinking about adding content you you know if you can't do a video a day figure out how many you can do a week and put that into a month if that makes sense to you so if i'm going to do four uh videos instead of doing them all within one week and waiting a month and all within one week and waiting a month i would do one every single week that that aggregated consistency will make a huge huge difference um and next thing i want to talk about is your cornerstone content pages these are going to be articles or information that are most important informational articles on your site they focus um on the best and most complete information on a particular topic their main goal is not to sell products okay and i know we all want to sell products and make money but you've got to give before you take because of this focus we usually think of blogs when talking about cornerstone content of course that doesn't mean it can only be a blog post all different kinds of websites have cornerstone articles rule of thumb if an article brings everything you know about a broad topic together it's a cornerstone content article so think about that if it's a broad thing like this is not a broad thing i'm talking about today this is very specific stuff i'm talking about today uh and then you've got your product landing pages product landing pages specifically differ from cornerstone articles they're different um the latter are lengthy where product landing pages should not be that long and i'm getting away from this myself rather than complete articles they should be focused these pages only need to show what your visitors need to know to be convinced they don't need to hold all of the information you obviously want to rank with these pages though and that means they need content enough content for google to understand what the page is about and what keyword it should rank for where cornerstone articles could be made up by thousands of words a couple of hundred could be enough for product landing pages okay so think of it that way next thing i'm going to tell you about before we get out of here today and i still got tons more information but i'm gonna i'm gonna have to cut it short uh let's see uh paul says when bundled products or stacks do you put those on separate page or buying multiple offers for savings um what i generally do if it's a bundle or a stack um is that is normally an upsell um so let's say um now i may have i may i take that back i may have on the landing page by one five or ten of something i may have that but the next page may be double your order or it may be an add on something like that um i don't like to confuse people too much so the way i structure it is when they go to a landing page let's say i'm selling beef chicken and turkey okay i'm selling beef chicken and turkey they come to the landing page and they select beef chicken or turkey when they select that it takes them to another page that allows them to get one five or ten of that beef chicken or turkey but i've already categorized them as a beef buyer a chicken buyer a turkey buyer okay so that's what i do on those um now you have to maintain your structure this is the bad part guys this is the tough part structuring or restructuring your content doesn't always have to be high priority within everything you have to do especially when you blog a lot or add a lot of content regularly it may feel like a chore although it isn't always fun you do have to do it or your website will become a mess to prevent that from happening you need to not only fix your site structure but you got to keep an eye on it while adding new content site structure should definitely be part of your long-term SEO strategy and then last thing i guess i'll probably tell you is evaluate your menu uh let's see here poll's got something in here uh so how about short video with a preview of next episode then short video preview then the long episode uh so does time affect ranking or fact content is out there on multiple days um well that's like a three-part question i don't know if you realize it or not the first part is the longer a video is the more time you're going to get on that page that makes sense right more time you're going to go on that page um revisits is another thing that youtube looks at uh and that google looks at do people come to your web page and do they revisit it so they're two different components uh and you would have to really kind of play around with that um i know like on my youtube channel one of the main factors and the reason i have a high rpm and cpm uh is because people seem to come back to my channel a lot and watch a lot of videos now if they come back to your channel that is one data point okay coming back to your channel is a data point if they come back to the same video that's another data point so if they come back to the channel and come back to the video those are two different data points but they can also be the same data point if that makes sense in other words they could come back to the channel and watch that video again or they could come back to the channel and watch another video both data points both important you have to kind of play around with that to really figure out what works for you best um so anyhow that kind of gives you a structure of what you want to do in your website i have so much more i want to talk about on this but i don't want to run over and keep you guys too long um but if you have any questions guys put it in that chat section put it in the comment section if you're not watching live a lot of you aren't watching live but i get it i have probably 90 to 95 percent of my views are not from the live broadcast and i'll tell you something funny about this guys let me take a sip real quick a friend of mine john woke who runs the jimmy kimmel show um i talked to him extensively about this and uh he said that it used to be these late night talk show hosts were trying to get as big an audience as possible they want to have as many people watch the show as possible uh and i've been in the green room at um um jimmy kimmel show and i've you know stayed there and i've watched what they do but that's no longer their intent that's not their intent because he says the the majority of the views they get are on youtube replays so now they're all jockeying to get youtube replays so like i'm doing a live video now live videos don't do well why am i even bothering to do a live video here's why because when i do a live video i'll get 90 to 95 percent of my views after i've gone live after i've gone live so that little bit of content that i do right now that i don't have a whole lot of people watching i know tons of people are going to watch it later on so you've got to kind of think in that term nowadays if you're doing some live stuff i want to let you know don't worry if you're not getting a lot of views and i see a lot of youtubers who used to get hundreds or thousands of views when they did a live now may get three uh and the reason they get three is people have figured out yeah it's live but i can always watch it later on you know unless i want to be part of it you know and i have a lot of great people to put contents in there uh in questions and all that and i appreciate you appreciate you doing that more than you know um but the majority of the people don't have the schedule or the time to do it so they will watch later on so when you're doing any type of live content guys understand that you're not going to get a ton of views now gary v could you probably go live and get a lot but he gets a lot less than he used to he gets a lot less than he used to and you would think well if you put out more content you do it more often you would grow he does grow in his after views but he doesn't grow in his live views okay and that's just the way it is that's the way this world works because we all want stuff when we want it not when the program wants to give it to us so you know and that's how netflix does it and how all these streaming services do it i know i can go watch it at my convenience because it may not be convenient at 10 o'clock in the morning on a wednesday for most people to watch me live i get it okay and i don't i don't slight you for that but for those of you who want to be here live i think it's great and i love having you here and it's awesome i really do appreciate you guys um so uh i think that's my thing on content if you guys have any other questions feel free to put them in there don't forget to subscribe hit that subscribe button down there turn it from red to gray ring the bell turn on all bell notifications you notified each and every time i go live or i upload a video which is pretty frequent i have a blessed weekend week gang thanks for sharing the wisdom no problem paul and once again i'll be here friday i'll be here saturday live for those of you who could show up live i will be here live uh and uh cranking out more content giving you guys more stuff um still working on the book still working on other stuff i have going on um let me get over here to uh oh wait oh wait i clicked on the wrong thing there we go i like the pre-recorded videos uh late at night binge watching oh that's very cool paul i appreciate that uh and i'll you know what i'll do i'll go ahead and show your content on the screen there uh so other people can see that that's a great idea you know and that's when i watch youtube um is i will actually you know probably from 9 30 10 o'clock that's when i actually turn on my tv which is really youtube that's what i watch uh same time saturday yes sir it will be at 10 am central standard time on saturday uh wait a second when i when i did that there's my tesla representation when i put your comment up there it actually uh blanked out my t-shirt uh doing this for uh elon and i tell you elon has done a lot for me already not on a personal level but on a stock level um i don't know if any of you guys bought the stock i bought it around 2015 i think i can't i can't tell you how much money that stock has made me it is blowing my mind how much money that stock made me um and it's it's the majority of my portfolio now and it wasn't as far as investment but it just grew so much thank you elon thank you elon guys i hope you have a wonderful day i appreciate you being here i appreciate you hanging out with me uh if you didn't watch this live don't forget to subscribe ring the bell turn on all bell notifications so you're notified each and every time i go live or if i upload a video yeah so there's that uh and uh give me a thumbs up that thumbs up thing oh my god it means so much hit that thumbs up thing it gives me a lot of distribution guys i'll talk to you later