Menu navigation, website navigation and page interlinking is an essential part of search engine optimization. The websites internal pages and the way that they link between each other will dictate page values and the popularity / reference volumes of pages. If certain pages have more internal links then others, search engines will see that these pages are more important because of the link profile.
Sculpting good internal website navigation is key to effective ranking patterns and having internal pages returned in natural search.
A websites internal navigation is key to SEO as well as website accessibility. Each page in the website will be evaluated based on its SEO merits, one key merit is the volume of other pages in a website that refer to this page.
You may have noticed that pages that are linked too from every page have a higher page rank and often become sitelinks.
If a page is linked too from every other page on the website, search engines will see this as a method of promoting this pages value. If a page is a key navigation page it will have priority over pages that are only referenced from specific pages. Pages that are difficult to locate in a website will typically score lower in search results as they have not been given much emphasis in the websites navigation.
Interlinking is the method used to link pages together using both the navigation menu and content on the page. A websites primary navigation menu should remain consistent throughout the website. Websites that have alternating menu's will suffer from an SEO perspective because search engines will have trouble gauging page importance based on its link profile.
Think of it from a library point of view, if you had 100 books, and 90 of those books referred to 1 book, you would consider that 1 book as important because of the volume of references it has, the same applies to pages within a website.
The sculpting of websites navigation is key to any SEO project, and should be done with great care and consideration. Structured website schematics allow you to plan how your websites navigation can work, and how you can incorporate the most important site pages to be given emphasis.
Interlinking can help in circumstances where the websites design restricts the way in which navigational elements refer to pages. Interlinking is easy to do utilizing content published across the website. Interlinking is the means of linking to other pages in the website using keywords within content that refer to other pages.
Lets look at an example:
Lets look at our Vauxhall Corsa Page: www.my-vauxhall-site.co.uk/vauxhall/corsa
It has a snippet of content on the page:
Vauxhall Corsa's are incredibly popular throughout the UK and parts of Europe. The corsa is more ideal for younger drivers, whereas cars such as the Vauxhall Astra are more for the family generation offering more room.
Vauxhall Corsa's are incredibly popular throughout the UK and parts of Europe. The corsa is more ideal for younger drivers, whereas cars such as the Vauxhall Astra are more for the family generation offering more room.
The above content could be a snippet from our page, in that paragraph, the Vauxhall astra is mentioned, which could be converted into a link to the Vauxhall astra page, once linked it would appear as follows:
Vauxhall Corsa's are incredibly popular throughout the UK and parts of Europe. The corsa is more ideal for younger drivers, whereas cars such as the Vauxhall Astra are more for the family generation offering more room.
The keyword "Vauxhall Astra" would then link to the astra page at www.my-vauxhall-site.co.uk/vauxhall/astra
This is a basic example, but you may see it on lots of different websites. You will find paragraphs of content that have links within them. These links are beneficial towards search engines and users.
A websites Navigation:
When building your websites primary navigation, you should consider the following factors:
" Does your menu keep consistency throughout the website?
" Are the pages in your menu the most important pages of the website?
" Is your websites menu navigation created in an SEO friendly manner?
" Is your navigation easy to use for your websites visitors?
" Does your websites navigation use dynamic technology such as Flash, Java or AJAX?
Menu consistency is vital throughout a website. This means that your menu should appear the same on every page, and shouldn't change because the page theme has changed.
The most important pages of your website should be featured in the menu navigation, this will give them the most emphasis as they will be referred too from every page within your website.
Your menu should be created in an SEO friendly technology. Using dynamic java based or AJAX/Flash based menus may render your menu uncrawlable, meaning that search engines are unable to access the URL's within it. If this is the case, your website will suffer immensely and pages internally may not be indexed properly.
The best way to test whether or not your websites navigation is crawlable is to run a link indexing program across the website, to see if all your websites pages are found, we recommend an application called XENU which is a link sleuth and will crawl your website, it behaves like a search engine looking for links through pages.
Download Xenu link sleuth from http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html
We recommend that a websites navigation is built in raw HTML / CSS to ensure that URL's can be crawled, along with the links anchor text.
Breaking down friendly menu navigation:
What is friendly menu navigation?
Well, remember earlier in this guide we talked about search engines parsing content from the webpages code? Well, if not, lets go over it again,
Search engines read the source code of each webpage, and filter out the text based content along with links.
If the search engine cannot read the links in the menu navigation, then it cannot find other pages in the website.
Menu examples:
The above is typical of a javascript based menu, these were notorious for SEO issues a few years ago, since, vendors have developed menu generating applications that are SEO friendly by incorporating HTML based urls in javascript menus.
If your websites menu is generated by a script include, then it probably isn't SEO friendly.
In your website editor, scout for the menu navigations URL's in the source code, if you can see them, then your navigation is going to be SEO compliant,
If you are using an editor such as Dreamweaver, you can use the search function in the application to locate URL's within your websites HTML.
Here are some basic TIPS for SEO friendly navigation.
" Javascript/AJAX powered navigation menus may look good and attractive to the eyes, but avoid them where possible. Instead use CSS and you could create almost similar spectacular and eye-catching menus.
" Don't use images for making menu images, instead try CSS, it's cleaner, quick and easy to manage.
" If it's completely necessary, keep the JS menus, but provide a raw HTML based alternative.
" Use text to link to pages in the navigation menus if possible.
" Place the navigation menus wither on the top, or the left hand table, or at a place where crawlers won't miss it.
" Don't embed your navigation in frames
When interlinking on your website, use only relevant keywords for links between pages. Do this in moderation, do not plaster your content with links or it may begin to have a spammy effect. Use only one reference to one url per page, so for example, if you already linked to the Vauxhall astra page once in the content, you do not need to repeat this.
Interlinking is a great way to build relevancy between pages on your website, and will help search engines index pages with ease.
Interlinking has a positive SEO effect when done correctly, avoid using long sentences for links, do not link to the same URL using different anchor texts and most importantly, make sure all link references are done in HTML using the standard attribute:
<a href=""> Keywords </a>
i.e.
<a href="/vauxhall/astra">Vauxhall Astra </a>.
Tips for Interlinking:
" Only use one reference to each page.
" Do not use too many references in your content or you may divert relevancy and weight away from the page itself.
" Ensure your interlinking is done in raw HTML.
" Do not use different anchor texts to link to the same page.
Using website interlinking, static navigation and consistent navigation is the best way to ensure your websites pages are indexed correctly, and given enough emphasis to perform well.
Remember, if pages have more links then others, they may perform better but this will have a detrimental effect on the pages linking out excessively.
