Smart Navigation Structures for Your Website

For many website owners, navigation structures are an afterthought.  Sure, they’ll include a few default pages because some SEO guru told them it was necessary, or they’ll organize their sites based on categories and tags because that’s what their blogging platforms default to.  Overall, though, the navigation structures of their sites are created unintentionally as they go along, without any real foresight or strategic planning.

But if you’re serious about your website, you owe it to yourself to invest a little time in ensuring the navigation structures you choose are best suited to your content and maximize the SEO benefit you receive from your site’s navigation.  Because the search engine spiders require links in order to navigate the content on your website and determine what should be indexed, paying attention to how your site’s navigation structure is organized can have a major impact on your search engine rankings.

According to the SEOMoz “Internal Linking Best Practices”:

“Hundreds of thousands of sites make the critical mistake of hiding or obsfucating their main link navigation in ways that search engines cannot access, thus impacting their ability to get pages listed in the search engines’ indices.”

Here’s how to be sure your navigation structure is working for you – not the other way around!

Create a Wide Navigation Structure

The first thing you must know about navigation structure best practices is that the search engines prefer sites that are organized using a wide, shallow navigation structure versus a deep one.  Basically, in a wide navigation structure, you’re able to access any piece of information on the site within a few clicks.  In a deep navigation system, information is buried and inaccessible without a complicated series of clicks.

Imagine looking for a piece of information on your favorite websites.  Chances are you prefer to interact with sites that make it easy to find the content you’re looking for by linking to the text in a number of different ways – especially when compared with sites that make you click through pages and pages of content in order to locate your desired information.

So how can you implement a wide navigation structure on your site?  Consider the following ideas:

• Interlink sub-pages. One of the biggest challenges faced by sites that use a hierarchical navigation structure (in which a top page points to a smaller group of sub-pages, each of which then redirect to a number of separate third-tier pages that aren’t interconnected) is that information found on the lowest tiers of the site is only accessible by one set click path.  Connecting these pages with internal links makes them more likely to be found by visitors and the search engines.
• Add multiple organizational structures. If you only have one type of organizational structure on your site (for example, category menus or date-driven archive pages, but not both), you’re limiting your site’s visitors in terms of how they can access different pieces of information.  Instead, consider adding different ways to navigate the site and its information.
• Expand your menus. When creating your navigation structure, it’s important to maintain a balance between offering too many menu options at first and keeping your categories so limited that visitors must click through several levels to find information.  Unfortunately, most people tend towards the latter situation, so if your menus seem too deep, consider creating additional categories or menu options to reduce the number of clicks needed to find information on your sub-pages.

Avoid Common Indexing Mistakes

Another major concern with your site’s navigation structure is whether or not the search engines’ spiders are able to interpret it correctly.  In much the same way that these bots can’t understand text that’s displayed as part of an image or Flash graphic, there are certain navigation structure mistakes that can result in your site not being indexed correctly.  The following examples are a few things to watch out for:

• Links stored within frames or iframes – Although frames aren’t used that often anymore, iframes (or, code within your site’s code that displays external information in a defined area on your site) are becoming more common in both web promotions and external applications.  Technically, links written within these code structures can be indexed, but most search engines have trouble processing their relative locations correctly.
• Links that require visitors to submit a form – Forms on your website can be constructs as simple as a drop-down navigation menu or as detailed as a whole-site search query that uncovers pages on your site that aren’t linked to elsewhere.  Basically, if a human visitor needs to submit a form in order to find a specific piece of content, the search engines aren’t going to be able to index it, so consider creating internal links from other pages to this content in order to get it noticed.
• Pages that contain too many links – SEOMoz estimates that, “The search engines all have a rough limit of 150 links per page, before they may stop spidering additional pages linked-to from a page.”  Though they suspect that this limit might be somewhat flexible, it’s still a good idea to limit the total number of links on any given page on your site to 250-300 overall.

Add Breadcrumbs to Sub-Pages

Breadcrumb navigation refers to the string of pages that defines your current location within a site, as pictured below in an example from the Intuit Website Services page:

Breadcrumbs are a smart navigation structure to add to your website, as they serve two important purposes – both by improving the visitor experience on your site and by adding a number of keyword-rich internal links to your SEO strategy.

In the first case, visitors on your site benefit from breadcrumb navigation, as it allows them to quickly and easily move between different levels of a website.  Instead of having to click the back button several times, your readers can easily move to another category or section of content, making it easier to find the information they’re looking for.

And when it comes to search engine optimization, breadcrumb navigation allows you to take advantage of adding site-specific anchor text to each page.  In the example above, Intuit has created internal links pointing back to their site for the keywords, “website services” and “register a domain name” – both of which are ideal keywords for the company to target.  To see the full power of this strategy, just imagine how the influence of these links would add up when used on every page across the site!

As you can see, creating the navigation structure for your site isn’t a decision that should be made lightly.  By understanding more about what the search engines value in a navigation structure, it’s possible to develop a system that allows human visitors to get the best possible experience on your site, while still catering to the search engine spiders that will help get your site ranked highly in the SERPs.

Image: jellybeanz