Designing Your Site Easier To Navigate

Navigation is very important for search engines optimization.  Navigating website design is an important event in helping visitors find the content they want quickly. This can also help search engines understand what webmasters consider important content. Although Google's search results are provided at the page level, Google also likes to have a role on the page in the form of images that are larger than a site.

Site Easier to Navigate

Plan out your navigation based on your homepage. All sites have a home or root page, which is usually the most frequented page on the site and the starting place of navigation for many visitors. Unless your site has only a handful of pages, you should think about how visitors will go from a general page (your root page) to a page containing more specific content. Do you have enough pages around a specific topic area that it would make sense to create a page describing these related pages [e.g. root page = related topic listing = specific topic]? Do you have hundreds of different products that need to be classified under multiple categories and subcategory pages?

Ensure more convenience for users by using breadcrumb lists. A breadcrumb is a row of internal links at the top or bottom of the page that allows visitors to quickly navigate back to a previous section or the root page. Many breadcrumbs have the most general page (usually the root page) as the first, left-most link and list the more specific sections out to the right.

• Allow for the possibility of a part of the URL being removed
Consider what happens when a user removes part of your URL Some users might navigate your site in odd ways, and you should anticipate this. For example, instead of using the breadcrumb links on the page, a user might drop off a part of the URL in the hopes of finding more general content. He or she might be visiting https://www.educationfresh.com/2019/11/googles-search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.html, but then enter https://www.educationfresh.com/search/label/seo the browser's address bar, believing that this will show all information education from the label SEO. Is your site prepared to show content in this situation or will it give the user a 404 ("https://www.educationfresh.com/2019/11/googles-search-engine-optimization-starter-guide")


• Prepare two sitemaps: one for users, one for search engines
A site map (lower-case) is a simple page on your site that displays the structure of your website and usually consists of a hierarchical listing of the pages on your site. Visitors may visit this page if they are having problems finding pages on your site. While search engines will also visit this page, getting good crawl coverage of the pages on your site, it's mainly aimed at human visitors.
An XML Sitemap (upper-case) file, which you can submit through Google's Webmaster Tools, makes it easier for Google to discover the pages on your site. Using a Sitemap file is also one way (though not guaranteed) to tell Google which version of a URL you'd prefer as the canonical one (e.g. https://educationfresh.com/ or https://www.educationfresh.com/; more on what's a preferred domain). Google helped create the open source Sitemap Generator Script to help you create a Sitemap file for your site. To learn more about Sitemaps, the Webmaster Help Center provides a useful guide to Sitemap files.


• Create a naturally flowing hierarchy
Make it as easy as possible for users to go from general content to the more specific content they want on your site. Add navigation pages when it makes sense and effectively works these into your internal link structure.
- creating complex webs of navigation links, e.g. linking every page on your site to every other page
- going overboard with slicing and dicing your content (so that it takes twenty clicks)


• Use mostly text for navigation
Controlling most of the navigation from page to page on your site through text links makes it easier for search engines to crawl and understand your site. Many users also prefer this over other approaches, especially on some devices that might not handle Flash or JavaScript.

Naturally and mostly text

creating complex webs of navigation links, e.g. linking every page on your site to every other page and going overboard with slicing and dicing your content (so that it takes twenty clicks).
Having navigation based entirely on drop-down menus, images, or animations many, but not all, search engines can discover such links on a site, but if a user can reach all pages on a site via normal text links, this will improve the accessibility of your site.