When planning a website, design work needs to focus on one important fact – a website needs to be seen to be effective, so it must be designed to be effectively seen. A good Houston SEO campaign can boost visibility when the website is already identifiable by both web surfers and internet spiders. While there are many different parts of the process that can affect how easily a website can be searched for and found, the one aspect that starts the process – and can end a website’s usefulness – is its navigation.
Navigation Location
If a website visitor cannot determine how to get around a website, the entire effort is essentially useless. If locating the right navigation menus take much longer than a few seconds, users will simply click off and find another, easier-to-use website. Menus must be found quickly and easily, so it is essential to put menus where visitors expect to see them, usually in a horizontal bar across the top of the page just under the header.
Besides positioning menus horizontally under the page banner, they can be located in other places such as in a sidebar. The main emphasis is to make menu design and placement such that a user can easily and rapidly identify where the navigation is and be able to use it immediately. Navigation can be greatly helped by having a sitemap located somewhere in the footer menu; many users have learned that when faced with problems with the primary navigation interface, a sitemap is another great way to move around a website.
Naming URLs
Sites that involve a lot of pages can experience longer indexing times, which can make it slower for a page to be recognized or its changes from being uploaded, all of which affects any Houston SEO effort as well. This can be helped through the strategic naming of URLs that are easily identifiable and include the keyword. It is best to keep it as simple as possible; the more layers that it takes to get to the named page is not only difficult for users but difficult for the internet spiders as well. On large websites with many pages, how the URL is titled can make a large difference in loading speed and SEO efforts.
Breadcrumbs
Another way to help users and search engine spiders easily navigate on large websites is to use breadcrumbs. Breadcrumbs are the navigational link trails used on many website that are particularly useful for ones with different categories and many pages. It is usually located in a page title’s banner and looks like: ‘Home/Interesting Stories/People/At Home’ or something similar and is an effective navigational tool.
When located on one page, it is possible to reach all others that were in the pathway with one click. In the example above, to go back to ‘Interesting Stories’ would only require clicking directly on that portion of the breadcrumb title to return to the primary location of that general setting. Any user who has ever become lost on a website know how help breadcrumbs can be. In addition, breadcrumbs help web crawlers to index faster.
When website menus are created in simple, easily located, and useful ways, pages are easier for visitors to use and web spiders to index, which adds to better Houston SEO. Use of relevant keywords within navigational menus, page URLs, and footer menus provide multiple ways for both search engines and users to find the same page, all resulting in a smoother, quicker website navigation experience so content can indeed be found!