How to Optimize Your Website Navigation Architecture

A great navigation architecture is an essential step of any search engine optimization structure. Ideally, a website needs a navigation architecture that allows visitors to quickly jump from page to page and to easily find any content they are looking for. However, it should also take search engines into consideration, and thus offers navigation features that allow these search engines to flawlessly crawl the website and to determine the importance of each page straightaway. Thankfully, the steps needed to create an appropriate navigation architecture are not very hard.

Home page

Obviously, the home page is the most important page in your website as this is probably where most of your inbound links are going to point and it will no doubt be the most frequent point of entry to your website. As such, it is also the page that absolutely requires a proper navigation architecture.

Your home page ideally needs to always have links that directly point to the most important pages of your website. As such, your most strategic pages, such as your Products page, your Contacts page, along with any other page that you have identified as important, should be linked from the home page.

Menus

Menus are the most important navigation element of your website architecture and the creation and implementation of a logical and easy-to-use navigation menu is always an extremely important part of any website. Unfortunately, it is very easy go overboard with menus, which is one of the most frequent mistakes of on-site optimization strategies.

An optimized navigation architecture should ensure that important pages are listed in the menu. However, it is not necessary to have every single page of your website linked from that menu. Too many links in your main navigation will actually completely diffuse the link juice of your website and will also cause too much emphasis to be placed on pages that are not actually important.

Another important requirement is to have a handful of your extremely important pages in your footer. Your footer must also always include links to your contact information and site map pages. The remaining pages should include those pages that are most visited (obviously excluding your home page). Given that users are already visiting these specific pages in droves, it is in your best interest to showcase these pages even more.

Blog posts

One of the biggest problems with blogs is that older posts literally fall off the map as new articles are posted. Although this may not be such a huge deal about low quality content, you obviously do not want your excellent posts to be buried in your site’s older pages. An easy fix around this inherent feature of blogs is through the use of Archives and Labels (or Tags, depending on your website).

By using Archives and Labels/Tags, you ensure that all your posts are always available within at most three clicks from the home page, which also allows search engines to index more pages from your website. If you have to choose between Archives and Labels, it is in most cases a much better idea to use Labels as these allow visitors to find specific content more easily.

Site maps

Many webmasters underestimate the importance of sitemaps, but these are another important aspect of websites. As mentioned before, the best place to link your sitemap from is your footer. In any case, it should always be linked from the home page since you want both your visitors and search engines to be able to access it without effort.

This is a guest post by Ashvin Sawmynaden, who is an experience blogger who writes in various topics. His recent articles include travel Seychelles tips along with recommendations on quality hotel ile Maurice in the Indian Ocean. For guest blogging in Techlineinfo go through the guidelines.