Disclaimer: This blog post was written from a hand held. Pretty pictures will be up soon

Been a while since I’ve had a chance to pop my head out from code monkey land, but I just wanted to share a little lesson I’ve been learning with directed traffic flow and site navigation. Because I like to share

Multi-layer vs. Single Layer Navigation

Sometimes you have a site with a total of pages in the single digits category, so having a CSS pop-out menu won’t be applicable. But if you’re dealing with a site that offers more than 20 pages, then it’s time to analyze your core topics and subsequent sub-topic pages. You may know the path to all these schnazzy pages you put up and are optimizing, but Joe/Jill Schmoe is gonna be in the dark when your site gets visited. Let’s look at how we can hold their hand to the desired point(s) of transaction we want them to get to.

Broad To Detailed

For the sake of argument, we’re gonna assume we have a site that runs at the least 3 directory levels deep. Like this;

Level1 = index page, robots.txt, xml sitemap, etc. etc…

Level2 = directories for about, services, company blog

Level3 = any sub-folders for about and services

Ok, there we have our hosting directory structure pictured in our head. Now we gotta think about our keywords, and how they can serve as links for all 3 levels of our pop-out CSS menu. Without a doubt, you’re gonna have a good cluster that are closely related to the industry or topic the site belongs to, so no need for new keyword research. But we need to watch for saturation too.

Level1 will be focused on the broader keyword terms, not very specific, but you know are high traffic and hard to rank for. These keywords or phrases need to be truly relevant to the anchor text going into the Level2 menu pop out. Same formula applies for creating the anchor text for the Level2 links, however, we can now get more specific on our keywords or phrases. Basically think of your medium traffic keywords here. Level3, you guessed it; low traffic but very focused keywords or phrases. This is a great chance to also try and increase the keyword weight for deep pages with some good old internal linking magic.

Which Pages Make The Cut?

Remember, pushing a page from the menu means that the target page should be something that can lead the visitor easily and clearly to a conversion point, or is already a conversion point. Content on these pages will need to be shown some TLC for whatever number of keywords you’re already after as well. So be ready to beef up on the writing skills if the page feels a little on the skinny side for keyword representation.

The Secret To Smart Site Navigation

When you visit a larger site loaded with pages and directories for miles, you probably notice the “calls to action” plopped around the page, above the fold.  Bolded anchor text, happy people in some image with huge letters surrounding their happy little heads.. whatever.  You get what I’m saying here. What’s vital to the navigation is not only the menu, but having a page that tells them what to do next and accommodates keyword relevancy from the menu anchor text that got them there in the first place.  Got all that? :p

A simple rule I’ve heard many times, and regularly practice, is not letting your conversion point be more than 3 clicks away anywhere on your site. So your presentation is crucial on pages linked to your menu.

My Findings

So here’s what backs up this little system. I have monitored a change in pageviews (increase), a change in funnel navigation (repeating paths), conversions have changed (slight increase over 2 weeks), and finally, my keyword rankings are starting to fluctuate around some on Google and Y!. Nothing concrete for ranking, could also be unrelated, but I doubt it.

Picture coming soon. Sorry.

Extra Credit

Don’t forget about the navigation layout on your site map page (html, not xml). Its a great way to boost a little keyword weight to key pages again, and you can retain link juice with the “nofollow” tag on the junk pages.