These days everybody seems to have a website or blog. A common question that I usually see thrown around by publishers is, how to increase website traffic or how to increase website ranking? The basic answer to this question is to optimize your site for search engines (SEO). There are many traits of SEO which determines page ranking, but for the purpose of this article I will be discussing the importance of site navigation.
Some people may be asking, “What could possibly be the importance of site navigation relative to search engine optimization?” This of course is a valid question, and is generally why site navigation gets overlooked when considering SEO.
As it turns out many sites that have indexing problems, the lack of representation in the search engines, are typically suffering from an inefficient internal page linking structure. If a page is not accessible by a link on your site it won’t be seen by search engines.
Generally, the most damaging errors relate to JavaScript and CSS navigation systems that the search engines struggle to read. It’s very important for the search engines how web publishers categorize and label their site’s content and navigation. One option to consider when writing or editing your site’s navigation is an XML sitemap.
An XML sitemap protocol was developed for spiders (spiders are the bots that search engines use to crawl and read websites for indexing purposes.). XML sitemaps are simply a background XML file listing URL’s for a site along with additional metadata about each URL. XML site maps are accessible to all major search engines so they can more intelligently crawl the site through top and deep level links.
Sites that use flash, image-based, or JavaScript navigation should definitely consider using XML sitemaps, as they are particularly vital. Search engines have problems crawling these types of sites. By integrating an XML site map you can now completely open up your site and its content. Sitemaps are also implemented often to consolidate vast sites with depth to a manageable means.
If you have considered sculpting page rank flow using the no-follow tag you can cap off the flow of page rank to pages considered unimportant from a search point of view. Capping off page rank to pages gets rid of potential duplication, and increases the relative importance of other more important pages.
Another consideration to make when designing or revising site navigation is not using dynamic URL’s. Search engines find it a lot easier to follow static web page URL’s and a defined path or directory structure. At worst, dynamic URL’s do not get indexed at all despite using XML site maps.
This is just a simple overview of the role that site navigation plays in SEO. Surprisingly navigation can affect your site’s rank both negatively and positively. So it’s imperative to create or review search engine friendly navigation, and hopefully you’ll be able to find your site listed on google page one sometime soon.
Link to this page
Related Posts -
Search Engine Optimization And The Magic Fairy Dust There is only one thing that all webmasters agree upon... They all want to be at the top of the... - Search Engine Optimization- The Significance From a small local business in a town to a big industry playing on an international platform, marketing has been...
- Looking For The Key To Search Engine Optimization? SEO. However you slice it, search engine optimization is something that you're going to need to know at least a...
Related Websites - Improving Your Site's Ranking With Off Page SEO Off-page search engine optimization is all about applying SEO outside your website, rather than on it. For many new Internet...
- Misspelled Search Engine Keywords In the past, people that were trying to rank their website in search engines would make use of misspelled search...
- Improve Your Site's SEO Results With The Essentials You can always get a healthy disagreement among people about which tactic is best. That is the reason why you...
