Website Navigation Design for SEO 2014

Website Navigation Design for SEOGood navigation of your website into 2014 and beyond is important in helping your visitors quickly find what they want. It can also help search engines understand what content is important to your website for SEO.

Your website navigation should be easy to understand and based on a hierarchy, starting at your home (root) page. Try to group similar items in a tree like formation, ideally with no page any further than 3 clicks away from your home page.

There is some evidence to suggest that text links are given more weight as a ranking factor than image links and so it stands to reason that the same would apply to links within your website navigation.

Use text links to create your menu(s) and use relevant keywords associated with the target page as the anchor text as opposed to generic terms like 'Home'. Again, it is important to strike a balance here between using search engine optimized text, while still providing a quality experience for your website end user.

Search engines are not very good at reading JavaScript, and cannot understand Java Applets or Flash components. While it cannot be disputed that these technologies bring a new dimension to web pages, they do not suit our purposes with regard to fine tuning of our website for search engines.

Given the weight placed upon website navigation as a ranking factor, it is suggested that you avoid the use of these (and similar) technologies in respect of your website navigation.

It would seem that at least one major search engine frown a little upon suicidal links, that is to say, links on a page that link to the same page, calling itself and going nowhere new. This small quality flag is often triggered inadvertently by webmasters that copy a block of code containing the website navigation to all pages on the website.

All seems fine at first glance, but you will have added a link to some of your pages that link to the page in question. For example, your contact page may well contain a link in its own navigation bar to the contact page, causing confusion when a user clicks the link which simply reloads the same page.

Disable these types of suicidal links in your site navigation by removing the anchor tags that surround the clickable text part of the link, or by removing the link from the page in question altogether.




SEO 2014 is our latest SEO book containing essential information for good search optimization practices along with details on how to recover from Panda, Penguin or Google Manual Web Spam Penalties.