| SEO
Book Chapter 1- Section 6
Site Navigation
Anyone
who’s been trained to design and create Web sites, views Web
site navigation as being for the Web site’s users. Search
engines use the site too, but they view the links within and between
Web pages much differently. The unknowing designer may even neglect
the search engine robot’s need to at least retrieve documents
on the site.
Many times
the common pathways followed by visitors are ignored. There is very
little user testing and usage study going on by Web developers,
so are a company’s top customers being served well? Since
80% of profits come from 20% of your customers, it is important
to serve them efficiently. In Web terms, that means fast, clear
and easy access to what they want.
Now, I’d
be lying if I said I have never written or input material that somehow
delayed visitors or confused them. I have done that, however, I
had to because the initial design of the site made it almost impossible
to write and place optimized copy using keywords. It is one of those
uncomfortable situations where you must do what programmers call
“patches.” That’s where you introduce a fix up
to the navigation to suit your link reputation needs or to focus
the PageRank effectively.
Navigation
will get skewed and conflicted when the site serves another purpose.
When you’re involved in optimizing pre-built Web sites, it
is tough to make navigation clear and sensible if you can’t
use keywords the way that is needed. Patch up jobs can make navigation
misleading and confusing, so make sure you run through the links
on your page to see how the user experiences them.
Priority
wise, there are three types of end users: best customers, all the
visitors, and search engines. By identifying them this way, you
can better identify how well you’re serving each.
That
means, there is often a conflict of interest that will affect all
the hyperlinks between pages. The choice to link certain key Web
pages from the home page, sets the site on a course that makes it
tough to overcome. Even if you’re only writing a couple of
Web pages, your links may have an impact. And as you’ll discover,
links from the other pages on the site to your page will have an
impact on rankings.
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