How Do I Set Up Good Site Navigation?
Search engines index pages on a website, and the more pages are indexed, the better off that site will be vis-á-vis the search engines; it may in addition be a deciding factor in obtaining
Google PageRank for your site.
Here are some tips for setting up navigation the search engine spiders will like:
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Keep it simple. Search engine spiders stumble frequently over all sorts of things that web designers like, including JavaScript and Flash animation.
Your navigation menus should be simple and clear: using text links is absolutely the best way to do this.
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Be consistent. This is a good web design principle, but it's also important from a SEO standpoint. Have the same buttons perform the same actions on every page of the site.
Put things where they should go logically and keep them there. Use the same action for linking to pages all throughout the website. (Spiders sometimes can perceive the same
page as different pages—with duplicate content—when different methods are used to link to them.)
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Categorize links with care. You may have a very large site that requires links to be categorized. While this is a necessary step, you still need to make sure that the most important pages
of the site have a direct link from the home page. The more times a customer needs to click to find the page he/she wants, the more likely he/she is to leave the site without taking any action;
and the same is true for the spiders. Make sure your most important pages are properly indexed by providing direct links from the home page to them.
These are all simple yet important steps in making sure that your site is well-optimized for search. SEO is becoming more and more important as people look for
customer-acquisition methods that will deliver long-term success, and small changes can deliver big results!
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