Thoughts on my site structure? (And a quick thank you!)

[NoahsDad]

I've learned a lot through this site (and the community built around it) about everything SEO related. It's been extremely helpful in helping us help others to learn that all people (even those with a "disability") deserve respect and integrity. (Wow, that's a lot of helps!)

So I wanted to give a quick thanks to everyone on this site who has helped, supported, and encouraged us. We really appreciate it.

One thing I've been trying to do on my site is look at my categories and over all site structure. I've pruned a lot of things from the menu bar; pruned away and tightened up the categories, and even rearranged the navigation of the site. As you can see, I have several drop down categories up top.

I wanted to see if I could get some feedback on how what I'm doing looks thus far, specifically as it relates to my categories / menus / navigation. Although any feedback you'd like to provide would be more than appreciated.

One thing I'm curious about (and not sure how to tackle it) is regarding the top most item in the main menus. For instance you'll see I have a top level category called "Down Syndrome Resources" which takes them to all of the posts in that category. Under that, there is a drop down menus that gives them other categories, and even some pages that fall under the topic of Down syndrome resources. I'm not sure if people would know the top most item is a link, or just look at the ones below it. (If that makes sense.)

(On a side note I have therapy as a category as well as parenting, the truth is those could all be sub-categories I guess since everything on my site pretty much could fall under "down syndrome resources." Maybe this is a huge FAIL I made when setting up my categories.)

I'm also not sure if I should use some sub-categories as well. For instance I have a main category for Therapy. Under that I have posts about speech therapy, physical therapy, and occupational therapy. Right now they are all grouped into therapy. Do you think I should use sub-categories on those 3 terms, leave as is, or perhaps another option?

Another question I have is regarding landing pages. It seems like I need to have  a landing page for my top "key words." For example therapy. Now if you visit my /therapy you get the category index page, not a "landing page." Same would go for the sub-categories if I were to create them. So I'm not sure if I should make a new post or page naming it something else (maybe "Down syndrome therapy" another named "Down-syndrome-physical-therapy" etc) or something else. (Although therapy isn't really the keyword I want to rank for, I'm thinking more along the lines of children therapy, pediatric therapy, therapy for children with Down syndrome, etc. So maybe I need to rename my categories? I was going for shorter names, so I very well may have done this incorrectly.)

All of these questions are things I'm not to sure about, so I'd appreciate any feedback or advice you can give me. And since I'm learning, I could be doing things wrong that I don't even know to ask. So feel free to tell me what you see that's wrong, you won't hurt my feelings. I promise.

Thanks in advance.

[bruce_werdschinski]

Hi Noah's Dad,

Great site, I'd not seen it before but I'm very impressed and take my hat off to you.

See what you mean about the top most item in the main menus, and I imagine a large percentage of people wouldn't know to click on "Down Syndrome Resources". There's two ways to tackle it.

The first option would be to have another link in the drop down menu with either the same name or "All Down Syndrome Resources". From a usability point of view I'd lean towards that.

The other option would be to try and highlight the fact that the top menu text is a link. By convention most people associate underlined text with a link, so my suggestion would be that when someone hovers over it (or the submenu) to underline the top menu text.

With having sub-categories for Therapy I think that's a great idea. If you had a smaller site with less content it may not be worth worrying about, but both for SEO and simply to make it easier for visitors to find what they're looking for I think that's the best thing to do.

For category index landing pages I wouldn't change the structure that you have, just spice it up a bit. Having a blurb at the top followed by posts is a good way to do it, but the introductory text that you have at the moment is a bit hard to notice. On http://noahsdad.com/therapy/ for example the headline is a plain 'Archives For Therapy' and then the text colour is medium-grey on a grey background so it's easy for the eye to skim past it straight to the first post.

If for that introductory section you have the text on a white background with a catchy headline and maybe a picture, I think that'll make a world of difference.

That's about all I can think of for now but if I come up with anything else I'll let you know. In the meantime if you have any questions please let me know and I'll do my best to help.

Cheers,

Bruce