| Chapter
1- 8
Menus
Contain Meaning
Site navigation
information within menus can be a good clue to what a site is about.
If the site designer, planner and copywriter have an aversion to
keyword phrases however, then the worst types of navigation conflicts
and user confusion will occur. Going back to the “brand imagery”
issue, the use of imaginative buzzwords and fluffy copy result in
hostility toward plain ordinary keywords. So the navigation issue
is actually just an extension of the aversion to ordinary keyword
usage. Within the recent past there were techniques that enabled
sites to have minimal numbers of keywords on a Web site and still
rank well. Times have changed and search engine rankings are competitive.
Now you have to use keywords on site.
When menus
are keyword compatible, they’re fairly clear and succinct.
Commonly, they utilize 2 to 10 graphic buttons leading to all the
key pages on the site. It’s certainly quick and easy for the
search engine to figure out what your site is about and which pages
are most important. Chances are, you’ll have lots of links
to your most important pages. The search engine can analyze what
the links to that page say. They do that by reading what’s
within the text hyperlink or the alt text tag or they read the words
around the hyperlink itself. They’ll even include title tags
and associate them with the link.
That’s
the way today’s link-based search engines work.
Google,
in particular, reads a lot into links and linking structures within
Web sites. You may not know it now, but how you link together your
Web site goes a long way to determining your search engine rankings.
That means you have to consider each and every link on your pages,
especially menus. You have to utilize them intelligently so the
search engine understands what you want it to understand about your
individual pages and your site theme. A general or standard menu
doesn’t tell the search engine which of your pages deserve
the most regard.
For instance,
if you have a text menu on every page with your first menu link
reading About us, you have a good chance to rank well for the keyword
search about us. Actually, you won’t rank well at all, because
there are millions of Web sites competing for that keyword phrase.
It’s the same for the old standard “home” button.
To your
visitors, that may be a useful link. They may be curious about who
you or your company are. For search engine optimization however,
it is a waste of search engine ranking power. Not only are you positioning
your Web site for the phrase about us, you’re also taking
away linking power from the really important pages on your Web site.
Later on
in Chapter 6, you’ll learn about a key component of Google’s
search engine algorithm, the PageRank system. This is a method of
ranking Web pages based solely on linking. It is commonly known
as Link popularity. Generally, speaking, link popularity is a calculation
of all the “votes” your site receives based on the number
of links that are pointing at your Web site. Internal linking is
also considered in link popularity. That means you must consider
how many links you have going out from the home page, via your menus.
As stated
previously, link reputation is based on what links say about the
page they are pointing at. When you combine PageRank with link popularity,
Google has a great way to retrieve very specific pages related to
a topic. Important Web sites and their owners have “voted”
for those specific pages. That’s where Google’s strength
lies. When the search engine also analyzes the content of the page,
it can retrieve some very relevant pages to searchers. That’s
why Google is so popular and successful.
It
is not enough to write a Web page using the correct keywords. There
will have to be keywords in other Web pages pointing to your page(s)
for it to rank well. No Web page is an isolated entity. It draws
its meaning and relevance based on links. You have to use your links
with precision and purpose.
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