Seo basics part 4: Site navigation
Posted on | July 31, 2008 | 1 Comment
The problem with buttons
Site navigation is a very important and often misunderstood aspect of SEO. A good SEO friendly navigation structure is not only friendly to humans but to search engines as well. Navigation buttons are usually more appealing to human visitors. Buttons give your site a cleaner more visually appealing look to your website, a feature that visitors love. The only problem with button based navigation is that crawlers have a really hard time with buttons. Most text reading crawler ignore buttons since they are unable to crawl images the same applies to banners and any type of image. Sure you can drop a few keywords in alt tags for the crawler to read but for to have a true SEO friendly navigation, text based navigation is the bread and butter.
Text based Seo friendly navigation
Text based navigation constitutes the best choice for Seo friendly navigation. Most crawlers are text based and their preferred navigation method is of course text links. Most sites on the web feature text based navigation for SEO purposes as not only human visitors can use it, but search engine crawlers can move inside your site with relative ease. How a crawler moves inside your site is a very important factor when crawlers rank pages. Sites that search engine crawlers think provide the best possible web experience will rank higher in search engine rankings. A site that a crawler has a hard time moving through urls may look to the crawler like a site that is not visitor friendly or disorganized which can lead to a similar site with a crawler friendly structure ranking higher than your web site.
To create a text based navigation make a list of text links pointing to your pages with content related keywords as the anchor text . Say you have an article about “The true history of car racing” you can use some related anchor text like car racing or history of car racing to point to you page. Remember that if you are trying to rank for a specific keyword like in the above example an article about “The true history of car racing” an anchor text that reads history of car racing would be more relevant than just car racing.
Additional Basic Seo tip: Don’t forget that a navigation structure should also be appealing to humans so don’t get carried away with these anchor texts in a way that they turn visitors off your web site. Especially if you are have only text based navigational structure and no buttons as people are supposed to use them to move within your site.
But my web site look trashy without buttons
If your site looks ugly without buttons, you can still use buttons as most people really do like buttons and have text based navigation for crawlers at the same time. Organize your web site so it doesn’t look to cluttered maybe moving the text based navigation section a little out of the way and you are ready to go.
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One Response to “Seo basics part 4: Site navigation”
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March 12th, 2009 @ 6:35 am
Thanks for the tips on buttons. Some really like em while there are others who don’t. It is all about a matter of preference but having buttons do not necessarily mean that the site should look cluttered. It should all the more make it look cleaner and more organized.