Treat those as beginners luck. The worlds a tough place and it shouldn't be this easy. I am not the person to speak to about design. But there are some things I like and some I don't. Keep the waffle to a minimum. Visual is good as long as it is quick and pertinent. A visitor wants to find what they are looking for in one, two at the most, clicks.

However to get back to SEO, you do want page after page after page of quality relevant content which adds value and depth to the title tags you use. Stuff you want to use to draw visitors to your site but which you don't necessarily want other visitors to waste their time with. So tuck it all away in a corner that is difficult to find. And there is no reason not to use a blog script.

Wordpress works with static pages on the one hand and Posts, News, Updates on the other. The problem here is the way they file and display Posts. Those that know about these things get all in a flutter over duplicate content and you are supposed to "no index" this and "no index" that. This is an area I have never really got to grips with. And it's important.

Short term it all works just fine. But when you are strategically placing links you want them to last for as long as possible. And the question I ask is what happens as the post gets pushed further and further into the archives? Part of me says minimise duplicate content. The other part says this could be a mistake. Rather leave it up to Google to filter it all out. I worry that by trying to double guess what Google wants, I might very well "no index" the one record I shouldn't.