Website Usability and SEO - Navigation Usability
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Navigation
A navigation path is a sequence of pages that the visitor viewed from the moment the visitor enters the site to the moment they leave, including navigation paths taken by search engine bots.
Text Links – The best navigation system is one that contains text links, both for usability and for SEO. Hiding links within JavaScript or other unreadable code, or buried in Frames pages or images, doesn’t allow a search engine to follow your navigation system, and it also makes it difficult for those with accessibility issues to follow as well. The best solution for this is to include additional text links for visitors and search engines to follow.
Anchor text – Anchor text is the words used in a hyperlink to point a user to another web page or website. SEOs will tell you how important anchor text is for optimization because it is another opportunity for you to include your keywords, and tell a search engine why this link is relevant to your content. This is also important in a usability sense because it directs a visitor to the linked page while giving them an idea what the link is about. Using “Click Here” is really a waste of your SEO opportunity. What may seem to you as self-explanatory may not be as simple for your visitors. Having a button called “Knowledge Base” may not mean much to some people. Instead, if that button would simply be called “Help” it probably would assist them better.
Breadcrumbs - The breadcrumb trail provides information to users as to where they are located within the site, and it offers shortcut links for users to “jump” to previously viewed pages without using the BACK button, other navigation menus or buttons, or using a keyword search. Breadcrumbs also give search engines an easy navigation path to follow to find all the pages of your site.
The term “breadcrumb” comes from the Grimm’s fairy tale, Hansel and Gretel. Hansel left a trail of breadcrumbs through the woods so that he and Gretel could find their way back home. Since today’s internet user will have a need to navigate back through a website path, the “breadcrumb trail” was named. Using breadcrumbs is not only a good idea for your visitor; it also gives search engine spiders a path to follow for every page within the website.
Titles – Using clear, concise titles will not only inform your visitors what your site is about when they find it in the search engine results, but it also helps a search engine determine the relevancy of your site to its indexed pages. A search engine has the capability of scanning the context of a web page, and determining if the title is indeed a good match. Visitors also don’t like to click on a search engine result with a title, only to find out that the web page has nothing to do with what they were looking for, and that the title was misleading. Make sure your titles are short, directly to the point, and most importantly, an accurate assessment of the content of the page.
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