Saturday 2 February 2013

Navigation Schemes and SEO

Starting with WordPress 3.0, powerful features were added to the platform that will allow for the easy creation of custom navigation menus. Many WordPress themes have even more impressive menu building features built into them. If you're working on your navigation menus and you want to make certain that you're doing it in a way that is as beneficial as possible towards your search engine optimization efforts, consider the following.



#1: Do You Have Breadcrumbs?



Breadcrumb links appear as text links that show the path you took to the page you're currently reading. They can appear on the top, bottom or anywhere else on the page, depending upon your layout. These links are extremely useful to users. Because they are useful to users, search engines tend to smile upon them, as well. Functionally, they make paging backwards through your website to get back to where you started as easy as paging backwards through a book and, therefore, they're great features to have on your site.


#2: Is Everything There?

There should be a point-and-click link to every single page on your site accessible from your navigation menus. If this seems like it's going to make your navigation menus too crowded, you simply need to learn how to use submenus more effectively. WordPress themes oftentimes have features built into them that make constructing menus with multiple levels of submenus very easy. When you're checking your site to make certain that you put everything together correctly, make sure that there's a link to every page from your navigation menus and that it's easy to find.


#3: Is it Well Organized?

Your WordPress navigation menus should be organized in a logical way relative to your content. Most of the time, any given page on a website can be organized according to its relationship with other pages. For example, if you had an auto repair tips site, you might have a navigation path in your menus similar to "Imports>Parts>Fuel Injectors". Such a navigation scheme would make it extremely easy for people to find exactly what they want. Make sure that your navigation menus are sensible given the content of your site.


#4: Does Your Menu System Conform to Standards?

One of the worst things you can do from a search engine optimization standpoint is to use a navigation menu plug-in or other technology that doesn't conform to World Wide Web Consortium design standards. This makes it almost certain that the search engines will not be able to follow your links. Make sure whatever technology you use conforms to the appropriate standards.


About author

Olga Ionel is a creative writer at ThemeFuse.com. She is passionate by Wordpress, SEO and Blogging. Don’t forget to check out stunning WordPress templates (warning: no boring stuff)

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