Building A Search Engine Ready Site: Navigation Beyond The Menu

Part 2 of 4 of Building A Search Engine Ready Site

Previously I talked about the wacky fun you can have inside the head tags! OK, maybe it wasn’t very wacky. Or fun. But I did talk about it, so at least that part is true. Today is all about smart navigation versus boring ass navigation. Yup, that’s the technical term for it too.

Typical Navigation Choices

Nothing irritates the sweet bejeezus out of me more than someone thinking their gonna break the mold on catchy and innovative navigation by getting all tricky about it. Always reminds me of back in the late 90’s when web designers were trying to introduce a higher level of art rather than functionality thinking that it would make the site more sticky to visitors. All it made me do was swear more. And probably drink more.

Now we got it figured out to standards. We got top nav as seen below

And we got side nav as seen below

And that’s pretty much what we come to expect on a site.

From my experience over the last 7 years, people respond strongest to side nav scenarios mostly because of how we have conditioned ourselves to digest the landing page of a site and how we should navigate it. Which brings me to the real issue of…

Optimizing Your Navigation

Within a matter of seconds you can find a website that uses the phrase “Home” on it’s menu. The menu link to your home page is meant for one thing and one thing alone; drop your company name in there instead of “Home” for branding and keyword ranking purposes.

So logically, each menu link should have the same goal for keyword goodness. But I encourage you to take it one step further and make use of the title attribute in all of you links. It’s good for giving an alternate or slightly more detailed explanation about the page it’s connected to and more importantly it’s in line with W3C WAI Validation techniques too. Visitors won’t know that, and the search engines won’t give you any extra love for doing it; but the name of the game is accessibility to all people. Remember, everybody’s money is green.

Inner Linking Structure

My specialty in SEO is pretty much on-site optimization. I guess that kinda shows by now. If you kick ass on getting exposure to your site, you need to make damn sure that when the traffic shows up they know where to go and what to do. Dropping links within your copy is a smart way to help people along, but the real value of this practice comes by using variations of your top 2-3 keywords you want that destination page to rank for. In essence, you’re catering to the visitor by providing a clearer explanation of what’s beyond that link all the while reinforcing your own need to rank for those keywords on those pages.

Don’t go overboard. Always think like a human when working out the structure. Google and Yahoo are smart enough to pick up on SE fodder vs. human aimed text. And MSN.. well who cares. That search engine couldn’t find it’s own ass in the dark.

Footer Links

Every time I used to drop in links on the footer, it was pretty much the same deal. We got Legal, Sitemap and some other junk we didn’t want to include into the menu. Out of curiosity I decided that I wanted to start dropping links to all my main points of conversion but with different anchor text along with the other stuff just to see what would happen. I soon realized that I had been missing out on more keyword goodness, and a higher chance of converting people. It wasn’t anything substantial in the way of conversion increase, but any chance to open up more avenues for positive goals can’t be a bad thing.
Some people are concerned about having a link back to the web developer’s site in their footer, as it might devalue their site. I tend to agree with this line of thought for these reasons; your website probably has nothing to do with anything on their site, therefore none of your content will place any relevance on that link. Also, you gotta deal with the whole issue of shared IP addresses and running the chance of being dinged for looking like you’re a part of a linking scam to increase rankings on the web developer’s site.

Web developers love to publicize themselves on their client’s site, so you need to decide if you’re gonna allow the link. If they insist on having the link, then you should insist on them placing a rel=”nofollow” in that link. They’ll still get traffic to some degree, but you’re covering your own ass.

If you really love your web developer, use your About page to make a reference to the fine work they did for your site and drop their link there. The About page tends to get more traffic than footer links anyways.

What’s Next?

Part 3: Hot Spots vs. Dead Spots

Part 4: Final Exam

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 15th, 2007 at 8:31 am and is filed under SEO, Web Development, Web Standards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.