Supplementing site navigation with links
by Detlev Johnson
When publishing your Website, the design of your navigation system should be a primary concern. There are usability aspects of navigation to consider. There are design aesthetics to consider. And finally there are the search engines. Your site should be findable in the search engines and today's search engines follow links. Your navigation is incredibly important for this process. You want to be certain that your navigation takes basic principles into account for maximum effect and does not hinder search engines from locating your important pages.
If your navigation system is too complex in code it might be preventing search engine spiders from properly recording your site. Spiders are electronic visitors that search engines use to record your pages for search. A navigation system that stops spiders will prevent you from taking advantage of having your pages recorded and returned to users of a search engine. If your pages aren't in the search engine, users won't find you in its results. JavaScript navigation can hinder the search engine spider from "seeing" the link and thereby not counting it in your favor.
You aren't entirely sunk in such a case. Search engines are generally great (but not perfect) at following links encoded with JavaScript. The traditional advice meant to help is to provide a "noscript" container with text links in your JavaScript code, or to have an alternate navigation of text links listed across the bottom of your pages. Many have learned that a sitemap linked from the homepage can help search engine spiders find every page. These things are basic - and they work well - in getting your pages originally recorded by the search engines but you might want to do more. The fact is, links can also be sprinkled throughout the content to supplement your navigation system and these are the kind of links that search engines count as important factors towards relevancy.
You want to give your audience the ability to read your content and follow links within it; the search engines will follow suit. If an important word or phrase can be linked to another page, consider doing so. First, these links tend to be useful to your audience and these links will also help the search engine determine which pages inside your site are about specific topics related to what their users are looking for. Remember, search engine users are not always going to arrive from the engine to your homepage. Search engines like to deliver their users directly to the relevant inner page when possible. Without confusing your audience with too many choices, you are better off providing supplemental navigation to users via links sprinkled throughout your text. This will also help the search engines determine which page to list.
Things to look for when adding links to your content include words and phrases that are natural keywords you hope to gain traffic from. Often these will be nouns. Nouns can be the best words to link because they are persons, places or things; the type of word that naturally can lead to another page with more info on that topic. When adding links to words found on the page, consider the words immediately preceding and following your link. You may want to reword the sentence so that there is a call to action with some benefit for the user; something that will incite the user to click on the link.
Think about text in and around your links carefully as it may be published in search results. These words can help the random search user make the choice to visit your site in the first place. The way this works is that if you've linked your important keyphrases to inner pages, the search engines may use the text in and around the link as a description for the page. Search users read this text to qualify the page for their original click. Properly done, this can make positioning less important, as your listings will look better than the average. It can make the difference between getting clicked or just appearing in search results.
Detlev Johnson, Vice President and COO of SuccessWorks is considered the world's top technical SEO expert, and moderates worldwide Search Engine Strategies conferences. Formerly the Vice President of Technology for Position Technologies Inc. and moderator of the critically acclaimed I-Search, Detlev provides the technical expertise required for enterprise-level sites, XML trusted feeds and ecommerce catalog sites.
Contact Detlev at deltev@searchenginewriting.com or (360) 224-6260.
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