Website Search Engine Optimisation - The Importance of Good Navigation A Beginners Guide by Brian Cotsen

Ever been in an unfamiliar office block?

Gone out to grab a coffee or use the bathroom?

Had trouble finding your way back to the meeting room?

Well landing on an unfamiliar website is a similar environment for your new website visitors.

Just like those unfamiliar corridors and meeting rooms, your web pages may look the same as all the rest, and once they've clicked away they may never find that page again... did you just loose a sale?

---

Unlike you, your visitors don't know your site intimately.

Unlike you, your visitors don't know what links to click & where they lead.

Don't make your visitors think!

Ok you get the point, I hope.

Lets just give you another mental image.

Imagine that you have been teleported into a supermarket.

You didn't arrive through the front entrance, you were just dropped into one of the aisles.

Even though you didn't enter through the main doors, above which would have been the name of the shop, and even though you are in an unfamiliar store, it is very easy and very quick to identify.

• That you are in a supermarket
• That you are in the tea, coffee & drinks aisle.

 

Why is it so easy?

• There are clearly labeled items on the shelf.
• The aisle has clear signs above it to tell you what is on the shelves.
• The store is well branded and you can see it's name clearly whenever you move around.

As well as this you are able to quickly navigate around and find the bakery counter or the fresh fruit & vegetable section.

Why?

• There are clear, easy to read sighs above all the aisles that can easily be seen from where ever you are in the shop.
• All the signs use the same font style, size and colour.
• All the signs are in the same position in each aisle.

Basically the supermarket has done everything it can to help the shopper navigate around the store without any thinking needed.

You need to do this too for your website!

For human visitors you need to be sure that:

• Links look like links - don't make visitors guess if it's a link.
• Links appear in the same way on every page - don't keep repositioning them in different places on each page.
• Links clearly state what they link to - A smiley face doesn't tell the visitor that they are linking to you 'contact' page, however 'Contact Us' states clearly what will happen when a visitor clicks the link.

There are lots of further conventions that you need to consider when designing your navigation, take a look at 'Building Websites' section for lots more on creating great navigation that keeps your visitors browsing rather than clicking the 'Back' button.

The importance of navigation and SEO

From a SEO point of view, navigation is important for two main reasons.

• It allows the robot spiders to connect to each of your pages and allow them to index all of your website.
• It gives the spiders an indication of what is on the page that the link points to, and this is very important in the assessment of the pages 'keyword' value and rating.

 

Lets look at both of these points.

 

Connecting all of your website pages

Imagine that you had a house for sale.

Now imagine that you have removed the staircase so that you can see the upper floor, but you can't reach it.

Well this is what would happen if you built websites without good navigation links to every page.

Your potential buying market would see all the rooms downstairs but be unable to view and evaluate the rooms upstairs!

How could they know what those rooms were like?

But all websites have navigation to every page, if they didn't why would the page be there?

Of course you're right. No one would upload a website with separate pages that don't connect, and yet this is what many many web developers have done without even knowing it.

Here's how.

Back to Abode Design.

When Lizzie & Emma asked me to take a look at the original website the first thing I noticed was that the navigation, seen running along the bottom of the screen, was not actually built in text but in images.

Although the words 'Home', 'Services', 'Contact Us' etc were clear to a human eye, they were built in a way that weren't clear to Search Engines.

Why?

Above is the enlarged version of the navigation bar found at the bottom of each page of Abode's website.

The problem here is that the links are built as an image, like the words on a tin of baked beans on the supermarket shelf.

Now search engine spiders can not read images, they simply know that there is an image, but they can't read words as part of an image.

So although your human visitors will know that if they click the 'Home' button they will navigate to the home page, search engine spiders won't be able to read the link and won't be able to navigate to the page.

In order to ensure that both the search engines and humans can find the links always ensure that your main navigation is built with simple html text links.

Other links that are invisible to the spiders:

• Links built in java script applets - like the pretty buttons you can put on websites that glow or do something when you hover over or click them.
• Links built on different 'frames' from the main frame that is on the home page. Many older websites were built using frames, to control the look and feel of them. Search engines have difficulty navigating a website built with frames and can miss links that aren't on the first frame that they crawl.
• Links placed at the very base of the web page. Some web designers place links at the base of web pages. This can be a problem as they will be the last part of the page that the web spider will crawl. If the spider encounters a link within the content, say to another site, it may leave the web page and the website altogether, with out ever finding the other pages.

For more about building good links read further articles in the 'Building Websites' section.

Give the spiders an idea of the content of the page the link points to

One major factor in search engine optimisation of web pages is ensuring that all of your important 'keyword' indicators match up. Keyword indicators are those factors that the search engines give high relevance to when indexing your page.

Quick recap of 'keyword' indicators:

• Title tag - words contained within.
• Description tag - words contained within.
• Heading tag - words contained within.
• Navigation text - words contained within.

As you can see we are attempting to use our most important 'keywords' & 'key phrases' in each of these 4 areas.

With Abode Design.

The 'Interior Design Services' page has the following words used within each of these 4 areas.

 

 

 

Title Tag - "Interior Design Services in London & South East"

Description Tag - "Abode Interior Design Offer Designing Services & Advice in London & The South East"

Heading Tag - "interior design services"

Navigation link to this page, from other pages - "interior design services"

As you can see the words 'interior design services' appear in all the four areas and this indicates to the spider that this page is about 'interior design services'.

Had we just used the text 'services' in the link text to this page, we would have been missing a very important factor in the web pages SEO.

When you are building your website's navigation pay great attention to the navigation:

• Build it in simple html text.
• Use words that tell search engines & humans what the page, they are linking to, is all about. No more 'Click Here' or 'Click The Link'
• Place them clearly near the top of the web pages.
• Don't burry the link in an image that only humans can read.

 

Now let's explore how the architecture of your website can positively or negatively effect the SEO of the site.

prev< 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11 >next

top