The navigation system of a website is one of the fundamentals of strong web usability and one of the cornerstones of professional and effective search engine optimisation (SEO).
Properly planned and the considered application of website navigation and website structure serves two main purpose for SEO.
- They enable the search engine spiders to properly crawl sites and index them.
- Improved web usability.
Crawlability and Indexability
Many sites with indexing problems and lack of representation in the search engines are usually suffering from an inefficient internal page linking structure. If a page is not accessible by a link from somewhere, it won't be 'seen' by the search engines.
One of the most damaging issues relates to JavaScript and CSS navigation systems that the search engines struggle to crawl. It's extremely important for the search engines how web masters categorise and label their own site content and Internal Site Navigation. For the sake of bot accessibility, it's also recommended that every website includes a user-accessible XML Sitemap linked from every page.
The XML sitemap protocol is specifically designed for spiders. In its simplest form, an XML sitemap is a 'behind the scenes' XML file, listing URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is relative to other URLs in the site). It's a map of all links in a site, uploaded to the root directory of a website and invisible to visitors. XML site maps are accessible to all major search engines so they can more intelligently crawl the site through top and deep level links.
For Flash-heavy sites or sites with image-based or JavaScript navigation, an XML sitemap is particularly vital. Search engines have great difficulty spidering these types of sites and historically SEO has suffered greatly as a result. By integrating an XML site map you can now completely open up your site and its content. Sitemaps are also implemented frequently to consolidate vast sites with depth to a manageable means. When a site contains a lot of archived content that is hard to find or isn't properly linked internally throughout the site, an XML map can reach deeply into the site's architecture, find and then index these pages. It is not unheard of for each subfolder to implement XML sitemaps for the sake of cataloging the contents of that folder.
There are other benefits. By sculpting PageRank Flow using the no-follow tag you can cap off the flow of PageRank to pages considered unimportant from a search point of view. For example, though a Privacy policy or printable page may be useful to customers there's probably little point in it being picked up by the search engines. By capping off PageRank to pages like this, as well as cutting out potential duplication you increase the relative importance of other more important pages such as those relating to products or product categories. The more internal links you have to a page, the more internal strength this page will accrue. Some SEO specialists report that one relevant contextual link from your own site can be worth more than 10 good external links.
Referring back to the importance of how site owners categorize and label their files, it's worth advising against dynamic URLs, as search engines find it much more easy to follow static web page URLs and a defined path or directory structure. In worst cases, dynamic URLs do not get indexed at all despite using an XML site map, no matter how important the information is on the web page.
URL Structure Tips
- Apply static URLs for your website pages instead of dynamic URLs. XML site maps should take care of dynamically generated pages, such as those in CMS
- Follow a logical directory structure with appropriate levels of pages, the most important ones being on the first level
- Try to keep the site as flat as possible. Do not go more than 4 levels deep in your directory structure
- Use Mod Rewrite to convert dynamic URLs to Static URLs for your website
- Avoid repeating a keywordin the URLs multiple times. This looks cheap to users and looks like keyword stuffingto engines
- Use hyphens instead of underscores to separate keywords in a URL structure
- Do not use very long file names or directory names for your website pages
- Avoid using special characters in website URLs
Web Usability
Web usability is all about developing websites in such a way that users can find what they're looking for quickly and efficiently, focusing on making it as easy as possible for visitors to navigate sites and to retrieve, input and process information. What better way to cultivate a loyal customer base than to give visitors a highly user-friendly experience in working their way around the site, easily locating the information they require? It's not just the spiders who prefer good structure and navigation. Research shows that 80% of usability is down to website structure and navigation. If users can't find what they want in three clicks, you've lost them, they bounce. Therefore it's critical to build an effective navigational structure.
Good navigation improves visitor experience and helps users to move around the web site from one page to another, promoting the right pages, guiding visitors to the all-important calls to action that go to validate an organisations website presence. It would appear that generally web navigation and structure are to a degree improving usability slightly with common conversion rates now around 2% up from 1% at the beginning of the century.
The internal URL structure of your website also has a direct influence on your search engine rankings, with the navigation menus and links helping optimise the internal linking structure of your website. The relative weights and relationships of their interconnection are all contributory factors in the search engine's relevance assessment.
At SEO Consult our designers excel in producing effective and rewarding website navigation structures, simultaneously benefiting both user experience and the demands of search engines and SEO. Contact Us for further information.
