Welcome to my blog today I will teach you on ways which you can use to create effective navigation for your site.Effective navigation should let a user know:
• What site they are on
• Where they are in that site
• Where they have been
Navigation and Search Engines
Good navigation helps search engines better understand the site structure and helps site users. Typically, your most important documents will have the greatest number of inbound links. Often, people will use tabs or images for their links that have a minimal amount of descriptive text in them. You can offset this by using descriptive text links in the page footer.
Proper navigation also gives you descriptive internal links. A popular technique for doing this is using bread crumb navigation.
• The first link would be a link to the home page.
• The second link would be to the chapter on search engine optimization. These links would be optimized text links that help define the purpose of my pages.
• The third piece of text would not be a link, but would just be text saying the page where the user is.
Setting up navigation looks professional, helps the user, and helps search engines understand the relationships between pages on your site. It also gives you better usability and higher rankings. You can’t beat that with a stick!
Visual Segmentation
Navigation that is easy to use aids conversion. Break navigation into main sections and subsections, using eye breakpoints and visual cues that enhance scanability (like bold text or a graphic) to highlight when a reader is looking at a new section of navigation.
Weighting Your Internal Navigation
Some webmasters try to promote everything across their entire site. This means that some of the less important pages are given as much link equity as more important pages.
If you know one section of your site is far more profitable than others then it makes sense to link to that section of your site across your entire site. If you know one section does not perform well it might make sense to demote that section’s roll in your navigation, and re-evaluate it later.
Using Nofollow to Sculpt Internal Link Equity
Some links need to be seen by users to aid your site’s credibility. Users expect to see a link to an about page, privacy policy page, customer support page, etc. Sending a lot of link equity to these pages means that link equity is being wasted. Instead of wating it, you can block the ability of these sitewide links to pass link equity by using rel=nofollow in those links. Privacy Nofollow can also be used on secondary navigation schemes that make no sense to emphasise to search engines. Some content management systems have category based archives AND date based archives.
If you structure your categories well the names of those categories should be well aligned with some of your target keywords. The date based archives are not going to be optimized for search though, so you could use rel=”nofollow” on links to date based archives. If you block link equity from flowing into low value pages on your site, you are causing a greater amount of link equity to flow into other important pages on your site. If you have a thin affiliate site and you are pushing some boundaries you probably do not want to be too aggressive with using nofollow, because use of this tag basically lets search engineers know that you understand SEO. If what you were doing was borderline spammy and they see you are using nofollow then they might be more likely to edit your site.
Dynamic Navigation
Some sites use JavaScript and other client-side navigation. Search engines struggle to follow things that happen on the client side (or in the browser). You can tell if a site’s navigation is client-side by viewing the source or by turning off JavaScript and active scripting and then reloading the document. I generally recommend staying away from JavaScript and client-side navigation. If you feel you must use it, make sure you add static text links to the bottom of your pages.
Site Maps
It is also a good idea to have a site map linked to from the home page that links to all major internal pages. The idea is to give search engine spiders another route through your site and to give users a basic way to flow through your site if your navigation is broken or confusing. You can also use the sitemap to channel link authority and promote seasonal specials. The site map should be: • Quick loading
• Light on graphics
• Overly simplistic I usually title my site map “site map.”
Sometimes, when people optimize their site map, it lists above the other pages in their site since it has so many descriptive words on it. The site map is not the ideal entry place into a website.
Pagination
This is not something most webmasters need to worry about, but some large catalog sites organize items by genre and then list choices alphabetically. If you have a vast number of related choices and are creating a navigation route that is more likely to be useful to bots than humans, you may want to link to all of the choices on one page or provide links to each of the additional pages near the bottom of the first page. If you only have one “next link” on each page, then each time a spider indexes a page, you are sending them to a page with less and less link popularity.
This may not be a big deal if you have other paths for spiders to search through your site, but if this is a primary indexing mechanism, you cannot expect them to spider through 25 consecutive pages of items starting with the letter “S” if they only get one of those links at a time until they index the next page.
Entry Pages that Convert
Poor pagination and other similar problems sometimes cause large dynamic sites to waste much of their link authority on pages that provide search spiders with little unique content or value. If these pages rank in the search results over more focused pages on your site, then you may have a much lower conversion rate than would otherwise be attainable if that link equity was focused on a higher quality page.
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