SEO for Site Navigation

Structure Your Navigation Simple and Easy

One of the difficult tasks for the webmasters is to maintain the navigation structure of their site as the site grows in pages. It is very important to decide the navigation style based on your future needs and structure it in your site, this helps in three ways:

• You as a webmaster can easily control the entire structure of your site which helps adding, removing and modifying the pages easy.
• Users can easily find the relevant and categorized content they are looking for.
• Finally, search engines can also index your pages category wise and show it in the search result with sitelinks. For example Google searching “Bing” will show you the below result which is the power of structured navigation.

Structered Sitelinks

Even though search engines show the search results at page level, structured navigation helps search engines understand the important of a particular page compared to the entire site content as the webmasters think.

Choose Your Navigation Style

Navigation consists of two major things – one is your site menu or blog sidebar and the other is your site links. Choose your menu as horizontal or vertical which suits best to your content design and easy grouping. Link your internal pages sensibly through your text content and images.

Site Navigation Style Options

Once you decided your menu navigation style then the step starts with grouping your pages. Every site has a home or index page which is ideally the starting point for you to think how the visitor will go from your home page to a topic specific page. If you have enough content about a specific topic then it is a good idea to create a describing page for all your related content. The structure could be something like this:

Site Menu with Describing Page Link

If you have many hundreds of pages classified under various categories then it’s a good idea to use breadcrumbs. A breadcrumb is an additional navigation link to help the user to understand where exactly the page he is looking currently is located in the site. This also can be horizontal or vertical and placed based on the content design. Some examples of breadcrumbs are shown here:

Breadcrumbs Examples

Make Your Partial URL Work

Sometimes users try to remove the last part of your URL to navigate one level up in your site structure. For example a user visiting "http://www.news.com/news/hotnews/recent.html" may try "http://www.news.com/news/hotnews/" assuming to see all hot news. You have two options in this case – one is to prepare a custom 404 page to show and the other is structure your site accordingly.  

HTML and XML Sitemaps

Sitemap is a guide for the users and search engines to instruct how your site’s pages are categorized and structured. You need to create two sitemaps one in HTML format and the other in XML format. HTML sitemap is to be placed in your site as a sitemap page which is targeting to guide the users to navigate through your site quickly. XML sitemap does the same function but for the search engines. Webmasters tools account facilitates you to submit your XML sitemap to the search engines, every search engines like Google, Bing, Baidu and Yandex offers their own webmasters tools platform for the site owners to submit their XML sitemaps. XML sitemap also inform the search engines about your preferred domain whether you want to show "http://example.com" or "http://www.example.com".  

Nowadays most of the hosting services offer auto sitemap for your site or you can use any of free sitemap generators available in the web. You also have an option to make a simple URL list of your site on your own and use it as a sitemap. Here is an example of this site’s HTML and XML sitemaps:

HTML Sitemap for User Navigation

XML Sitemap for Search Engine Navigation

Use Custom 404 Page For Your Site

Over the period of time maintaining a site with lot of pages grouped into categories becomes very cumbersome task and leads to many broken links in your site. Site updation is an important cause for broken links, when you change a page’s URL the existing links to your old URL will become invalid and most importantly search engines need lot of time to remove your old URL from the search results even though your new URL might be indexed. In normal scenario both of your old and new URLs will be shown in the search for sometimes and the users clicking on your old URL will end up in seeing a 404 Page Not Found page.

The other reason could be user entering a wrong URL in the address bar directly taking him to 404 page. The purpose of custom 404 page is to guide the users in such a page not found cases to retain them in your site.

You can use any broken link checker tools is available in the web to make sure your site is not having any broken links otherwise you can regularly check your Webmaster Tools account to check which page is causing a 404 error and rectify it accordingly. You can provide a link to your home page and other popular related contents in your custom 404 page.

If you are not sure what to link in your custom 404 page simply use Google’s 404 widget. This widget can be embedded in your 404 page and automatically populate useful links.

Dos and Don'ts with Your Site Navigation:

Dos

• Select your navigation style that suits you content, meshing too many visible menus will confuse the users
• Use internal text links effectively to connect your own pages
• Use contextual links to navigate from one page to another page of your site; this will help search engines as well as users to navigate easily throughout your site.
• Using 404 page effectively and hiding it from the search engine.

Don'ts

• Relying completely on the menu for navigation without any contextual links guiding the users and the search engines from one page to another page.
• Using complex navigation styles like inserting navigation menus in-between the content.
• Using flash and image files for navigation, some of the browsers do not support flash content hence users will be lost on your site.
• HTML Sitemap with out of date broken links.
• HTML Sitemap with simple URL list without organizing them into categories.
• 404 page without any further links for the user to navigate and allowing search engines to index your 404 page.