Thread: Navigation

Navigation:

The site navigation is from an architecture point of view the most important part of the site, but looking strictly at an on-page perspective there are a number of things that you should bear in mind.

The navigation area is on every page (normally) of your website, is it built in clear concise html or are you employing JS? If its the latter then be sure that you have spiderable versions so that spiders can find their way through your site.

Also, if you ARE using Javascript you would probably be advised to investigate the potential of using "real" html as its much lower on resources and overall size so it increases the pageload time and reduces the page size overall.

Is the nav area keyword rich if not, why not, its valid page real estate and it should be full of the keywords that you want to focus your site on. Be careful not to try and change the navigation anchor text from one page to another as there is evidence that this isnt optimal.

Are you linking to just the pages that you shoulttd be? Bear in mind that your linkjuice is being distributed amongst all the pages that you are including in it, therefore if you are linking out to 80 or 100 pages in your navigation, the total amount of strength going to each page is relatively minimal.

I heard that content at the left and sidebar will be put at right is better than reverse. Because Google Spider crawl from left to right. How do you think about it?

Thats an absolute fact - the most important link on a site's structure is in the top left, while the least important one is bottom right.

The strength tends to follow the vertical axis mainly, with a much smaller difference from left to right,

ie, Top Right is FAR better than Bottom Left

Originally Posted by vtechtip

I heard that content at the left and sidebar will be put at right is better than reverse. Because Google Spider crawl from left to right. How do you think about it?

Yes it should be on the top or in the left.

I feel(as opposed to know) that a simple but precise sitemap containing textual explainations(written in html) is the best link to have top left... If you view my page you'll see that's exactly what i have there.

My experience is you have one of two options put the content first or put your links first. By placing your links first, and placing your most important links at the top you can use what's known as link source ordering.

Navigation also needs to be easily understandable by both search engine and actual human visitors. There's no point in having a site that your users can't figure out how to navigate.

The navigation structure is just called siloing structure which is nothing the the internal link navigation where a particular link is added or directly connected with another link which is also relevant with the previous link one. The link navigation should be properly formatted and the link should consist relevant anchor to pass on link juice.

Search engine bot crawls a website from top to bottom and from left to write, so the most important link of the page should be placed on the top left panel and top right panel is more effective than the bottom left panel.

Let's talk about flash navigation and rankings.

Some sites are full of flash. Some partly, just the navigation.

I know we can make HTML/XML sitemaps and create an HTML version of each page.

But do you think flash pages or pages linked by flash have less advantages in rankings? And what's the best solution for this? Do you have any study case that I can learn from?

Sorry I'm not a flash expertise BTW.