Link structure for sites with 30-50 pages?

I don't understand it. I have lots of niche sites (8-10 keyword optimized pages) and I can make them rank pretty well for most of the keywords, but I just can't make my sites with more pages rank for anything at all

My niche sites have 8-10 keyword optimized pages, each page target a specific keyword. All the pages have links to all the other pages in the sidebar.

When I create bigger sites (30-50 keyword optimized pages or more) it looks pretty stupid to have links to all the other pages in the sidebar. I therefore need to structure the sites differently, but all the link structures I have tried haven't worked. I have 6 or 7 such sites and they don't rank for anything at all

Any ideas/examples on how to setup a great link structure for sites with 30-50 pages or more?

 

If all of the pages have access to a menu on the sidebar or header area, then they should interlink (normally).

You could use something like Joomla, Drupal, or Wordpress for your sites. They all link the internal pages well.

 

yeah, interlinking is important, semantic tags are great

also, content regarding the same topic should not be using the same anchor text in the link with internal links. this dilutes the term

data organization should be a constant process and consideration.

 

I most often use Wordpress for my sites, but the problem is that I can't fit links to all the pages in the sidebar or header area.

 

I suggest you to create a sitemap for your sites. If you link internally a website that has 4/10 pages you do not need it, but you need it for more than 20 pages: it helps the bots to read and index your site quicker like in here http://www.seo-guru.net/seo-optimization.html

 

Keep it very simple, if you only have 30-50 pages, have a left nav with all those links included and keep that left nav on every page. Done!

 

But what if I have for example 200 pages? I have content ready for such big sites, but my results with 30-50 page sites have discouraged me from giving bigger sites a try.

 

But will a sitemap be enough? Using a sitemap will only give each page a single internal link and it will not be from the frontpage (which is usually the most powerful page on the site).

All my pages on 30-50 page websites get indexed within a week or so, but they just don't rank.

 

Keep the site structure flat and horizontal as possible cos deep linking needs deep crawling which sometimes isn't easy. Moreever, create a sitemap and submit to google. That should do the trick.

 

A sitemap submitted to Yahoo, Google, MSN would be good. Update when there are changes.

Also, you can have a sitemap for users (which the spiders can follow too) on a sidebar or header. Some put one in the footer, which is more for the spiders. It should be user friendly, unlike the one you'd submit to Google.

 

Don't think the ideas of a sitemap are the answer to your problems...

It really is necessary to have good internal linkingstructure to rank well for competitive keywords. Having said that, I don't have the answer right away, but I would look at some topranking related sites and see how they are interlinking their pages.

If your sites consists of 4 main topics, you can link those 4 topics from mainpage and on those 4 pages you can further link to all other pages in that specific topic. But that's just an idea and your site needs to contain different topics...

It really depends on your niche and site, but most of my ideas come from looking at the topranking sites for your keywords/niche and try to discover what works and what doesn't. You would have to be careful not to copy the site ranking first, as they could have such enormous linkpower that no matter how they interlink their pages, it would rank top anyway.

I would analyze the top10 sites for linkingpower first and start looking at how the site with the least linkingpower interlinks, as they have to be smarter since they don't have that much linkinkpower to begin with.

 

Excellent idea tfbpa, I'll give it a try. I totally agree that sitemaps aren't the answer - my problem is ranking, not getting indexed.