Site Navigation

Navigation in an SEO site must strike a balance between being spider friendly and being user-friendly. It’s important to remember that even though the pages are search engine optimized, if a user can’t navigate around them, all of those extra eyeballs won’t translate into sales.

I prefer to use either a side navigation bar or a top navigation bar. Make use of style sheets (CSS) to make the links attractive and consistent with the design of the site (make sure your CSS are kept in an external file as opposed to in the head of each page). You should try to use keywords in your navigational links that correspond to the pages that they’re pointing to.

It also makes sense to use of a lot of page cross linking within your site. This, again, has a two-fold purpose. It lets your visitors find where they’re going as well as makes your page all the more spider-friendly for the search engines. Links, specifically text links, are how the spider finds your pages. And as an added benefit, in some search engines (Yahoo!), link text that contains keywords seems to give that page a boost as well as the page it’s linking into. So make liberal use of text links wherever practical.

Another great place to make use of keyword text links is along the bottom of your page in a footer. This is spider-friendly and gives your users an easy way to navigate when they’ve finished with the page they’re on. The bottom of a page is also a great place to merchandise offers, similar products, different date ranges, etc.

Breadcrumb navigation achieves the same thing, especially on a site that is more than a couple of pages and/or directories “deep.” If you’re not familiar with breadcrumb navigation, see this link.


Tagged as: SEO, Optimization Tips