Navigation Structures That Appeal to Users and the Search Engines

Many webmasters set up their navigation structures without a second thought, based on what’s easiest to do within their site-building programs or based on whatever particular structures their competitors are using.  However, this is a mistake.  Navigation structures – when set up correctly – can confer powerful benefits on a website, which makes them well worth your time and attention when your site is first launching.

Trust me – it’s a heck of a lot easier to put the time into developing the appropriate navigation structures for your site before it first launches than to realize six months down the road that things could have been done more effectively…

So if you’re thinking about launching a website (or if you’ve found that your current site isn’t meeting your visitors’ needs), be sure to check out the following advice on how to create navigation structures that will appeal to both your users and the search engines.

Overall Site and Page Structure

If you’re running a static HTML website, your overall navigation structure can be thought of in terms of pages and sub-pages, with top-level content that forms your navigation menu and sub-pages that are displayed as drop-down menus.  On the other hand, if your website runs on a blogging platform like WordPress or Typepad, your navigation structure will be driven by categories, along with the pages or posts that are assigned to these categories.

But however your website is run, it’s important to plan out your top-level content or categories carefully, from the perspective of both your viewers and the search engines.  Here’s what you need to think about…

From a viewer’s perspective, one of the most important questions you need to ask yourself is, “What types of content will my viewers want to access first?”  Although it’s difficult to do when you’re so involved in the process, try to understand what specific pieces of information the visitors on your site will want to see first and then brainstorm ways to make this content as obvious as possible.

Ask yourself the following questions when trying to understand how your site should be structured from your visitor’s perspective:

• What single piece of information do I want a first-time visitor to know about my business?
• If someone has never heard of my business before, how can I structure my site to make key pieces of information immediately obvious?
• How can I lay out my site so that visitors intuitively know how to access more in-depth information on my business, products or content articles?
• Where are my visitors coming from and how can I use these sources to determine what information to include on my landing pages?

While thinking about these questions, you might find it useful to conduct an exercise where you create fictional character profiles to represent the visitors arriving on your site.  For example, you could create a profile of a first-time visitor, a visitor who’s looking for a specific product that you sell, a visitor who’s been to your site several times before and so on.  Put some effort into thinking about what types of information each of these visitors needs to access and how you can balance their sometimes competing needs.

As a result of these exercises, you’ll likely come up with a navigation structure that meets the following best practices:

• Top-level content or categories are based around the specific keywords people are using to find your site through PPC, search traffic and social media
• Your site structure is “wide” (rather than “deep”, which refers to the number of clicks needed to reach every sub-page on your site) to allow people to find related information quickly
• Key differentiating points about your company are located on multiple pages and incorporated into your website design

Now, the good news is that all of these criteria benefit your site from a search engine optimization point of view as well.

For example, by integrating your brand’s target keywords into your site’s navigation structure, you create internal links that are full of keyword-rich anchor text and sub-pages that integrate your target phrases into your page URLs.  Both of these elements help your site to be indexed and ranked for your target keywords, allowing your site’s navigation structure to contribute in a meaningful way to your traffic generation efforts.

Similarly, creating a wide navigation structure versus a narrow one helps the search engine spider programs to be able to quickly and effectively index every page on your site.  For maximum benefit, it’s recommended that you create your navigation in such a way that every page can be reached within three clicks, which can be accomplished through the use of internal links in your content and additional categories or sub-pages that allow all the content on your site to be accessed quickly.

Breadcrumb Navigation

Breadcrumb navigation is the name for the small series of links that appears at the top of each page on sites that utilize this navigation structure, denoting where on the site a person is, as in the example below from the Intuit Small Business Websites page:

As with your overall site and page structure, breadcrumb navigation serves an important purpose for your visitors, as well as for the search engines.  The use of breadcrumb links helps visitors to determine where they are on a site, which helps to create a positive user experience.  These links also encourage visitors to view other areas of the site, which reduces bounce rate and improves average visitor time on site.

But not only do these “navigation trails” help visitors to traverse your site effectively, they also provide a powerful search engine optimization benefit by allowing webmasters to include keyword-rich internal links throughout their sites.  These links help the search engines’ indexing programs to discover new pages on the site, as well as increase the frequency of keyword usage on pages and site links.

If your site is built on a blogging platform, adding breadcrumb navigation to your site could be as simple as installing a plugin that includes this feature on each page of your site.  If you run a standard HTML site, adding these links will be a little more complicated, as you’ll need to edit either your site’s CSS files or page template codes.  However, it’s well worth your time to figure out how to integrate breadcrumb navigation into your site (or to hire the project out to a web developer) given the benefits described above.

By taking the time to understand how both visitors and search engines rely on your site’s navigation structures to find and index content on your site, you’ll uncover a site organizational strategy that will allow your website to grow successfully and reach the maximum number of readers as possible.

Image: Steve Snodgrass