tutorial layout

[Jaffro]

I'm working on a tutorial, and soon to be working on a tutorial site. I was woundering what is best as far as seo goes in term of the navigation of a tutorial. To get the best out of my PR should it be:

a) one long page with all the steps of the tutorial on. [that interlinks with all other pages on the site]

b) each step has its own page where they link TO all other pages in the site but NOT linked FROM any other pages but the step before and after. ie. step2 only has incoming links from step1&3 but has outgoing links to the rest of the site.

c) each step has its own page and all pages interlink with all other. ie, you can get to any page of the site (even tutorial steps) from any other page of the site.

Or if i've confused you out of knowing what i'm on about, any suggestions?

[MarkB]

Have the titles of the tutorials in H1 tags.

Link to the tutorials using text such as 'Photo Edges Part 2'. Or something :)

[Jaffro]

Yea, i'm going to do them for sure. Use a lot of the H tags and naming techniques already. Its just the arrangement of the pages and the internal links i'm thinking of.

I've got my 'homepage' (the index of the site). I'm going to have a page for the introduction to the tutorial area. I suppose it wouldn't be realistic to link to every part/step of the tutorial from the index so i guess it comes down to - do i link to every part of the tutorial from the introduction? and should each part link to every page of the site (including all other parts)?

[Chris]

Using a web linking structure spreads PR to all the article pages.

Using a heirarchical structure focuses it on the first page of each article.

[Jaffro]

I guess the best thing would be to focus it then?

[Chris]

Depends.

If you want to get each article ranks well, more than you want to get each article page ranked well, then focus it on the first page. Thats what I do.

For a very large article you could add some manual navigation to different sections.

[Jaffro]

hmm yea. I think for the current tutorial i'm doing (for msn emotions) i'll just leave it as one big page, cause i cant be bothered to break it up basically and i dont think it will make any difference.

but for the dedicated tutorial site i'll focus it on the first page like you say. Thanks chris :)