OK GUYS I am stepping into

[mtgman]

the Lions Den once again. Please take a look at my new website, its close enough to being finished. Let me know. How you like the design, functionality, navigation etc.

www.home-loans-va.com

Thanks!

[kyle422]

Everything looks really good to me. Simple, easy to look at, and not at all confusing. Very good site.

[JimJ]

Everything looks really good to me. Simple, easy to look at, and not at all confusing. Very good site.

I agree. Too many sites are cluttered up with way to much stuff. Good Job. Simple sites also load faster. Morgan once told me that he has seen studies done that say that most people will not click past about 7 links.

[judyo]

I agree that the site looks great.

Hate to change the subject here but Jim's post makes me have to ask a question. I see you, Jim, have several small sites on different areas of Idaho. Patricia's site looks like the one with the most info, links, etc. I've read two rules of thumb:
1. Make your site as many pages as you possibly can (of good, non-dup content, of course) & keep adding to your site as much as possible. Seems like this is mainly for SE placement, right?
or
2. Keep your site short, concise & simple. I never heard about Morgan's 7 link study before, very interesting & I believe it.

Jim, are you referring to a site in it's entirety or just the home page? How do your smaller sites get good placement in search engines? My question is because I, too, am working on another small local site for my immediate area & I have a larger site in the works that will span my entire county instead of just one town.

mtgman, I could ask this of you, too, as you also have several sites available that have a certain amount of pages & don't seem like limitless page sites that you keep adding information to for the sake of increasing content. Many others on this forum seem to follow that, too.

IOW, I guess I've read about more people saying that instead of creating several smaller sites, combine all of that information into one site for best search engine placement. But I also agree that those kinds of sites are too difficult for actual web surfers to deal with.

[JimJ]

My Boise site only has like 7 or 8 links on the navigation bar. If you click on these they open up into sublinks. So you can add tons of pages and still only have a few links on your home.

My mothers site (Patricia) is a homes.com template. I do not have to much control over the content. Most of her pages are getting hit with a duplicate penalty from G. But because we are using her site to take out the easier terms for my area, I am not to worried about it. I have very little work into this site and it ranks #1 for her term.

As for my other two sites, one is being built for my Aunt and the other for my sister. Both of those are just temporary so I could start trading links. The actual sites are not quite done yet and niether one of these rank very well for anything. They do have some ranking but these markets have almost zero competition.