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Well the weekend has come and gone and are we ever beat! I don't think we've put in hours like we did this weekend since we first started in adult and now we're a bit older and not so used to long hours it will probably be a long while before we ever work that hard for that long again.

This time we had a deadline to meet and we got there and delivered over 70 pages divided into four categories and all hooked up to the main navigation framework. No page is more than three clicks away from the index page; absolute navigation links were used and despite the fact that nothing was live till we uploaded the complete site there was only a few navigation links that needed to be rewritten.

We would definitely like to sit back and take a break but that's not going to happen today unfortunately.

If you are ever building a big site with complex categories and navigation then make sure that no page is ever more than three clicks away from the index page. That's important because visitors to your site begin to lose interest the further they have to travel to find the information they're looking for.

It's also important because search engines tend to follow links down about three levels before they move on. Of course there are times when some pages might have to be four or five clicks away from the index page for surfers ... and if you lead them down to those pages by placing information along the way that's important to them they'll follow it but search engine spiders don't.

But that doesn't mean you can't have those deeper pages still only one click away from the index page for those search engine spiders. The perfect solution to that problem is a sitemap linked from the front page. Sitemaps don't have to be anything more than a bunch of text links and when you use one you will find that the pages on your site ... no matter how deep they are for human visitors ... will always be accessible for the visiting spiders.

And while we're on the subject of search engines let's stop and think about keywords for a few moments. Every one of those pages that we wrote had individual titles, individual descriptions and focused on the main terms that were important for our client as well as quite a few minor terms as well.

Even though we worked hard to find the right keywords to target I'm sure that we've missed quite a few because not everyone searches for the same terms even though they might be looking for information on the same topics. And quite often the term you might use in such a search is not the term most people would use if they were looking for the same term.

The United Kingdom branch of Hitwise recently released some interesting research on search terms that are important to the property market and they highlight the different terms some people use when they're looking for real estate. Over there Hitwise considered that ...flats' (the US equivalent term would be ...apartment), ...houses' and ...property' would be the important terms ... and if it was me doing the search I would use the words ...flats' or ...houses'.

Hitwise was surprised to find that more people in the United Kingdom used the word ...property' in their search terms than either of the other two words. Even when the numbers using ...flats' and ...houses' was combined it still didn't reach the number of people who used the term ...property'.

So the lesson for us is that, just because we think a word or term will be what people are using when they're searching for our product the chances are that we'll be wrong. We need to spend time doing keyword research way back in the planning stage for any new site we're building and we need to go on doing keyword research long after the site has been built.

After the site is built we need to compare our original research with what our server stats are showing us. Are people finding our site for the terms we were targeting or are they finding them for other search strings that we never even thought of?

If we're working in adult we may not be able to go back and tweak the pages to be more effective for the terms we were targeting ... or to be more attractive for the terms people are using to find our sites ... but we can be adding that information to our knowledge base and incorporating those new terms into sites that we're now building.

The longer you stay in this business the more money you will make if you take the time to research the search terms that are important for you.