Website navigation optimized for search engines by Mark Nunney, 15 August 2007

Navigation is key to helping users and search engines find what they want and it is essential to search engine optimization (SEO). Here’s a introduction to how to optimize your site’s navigation.

Site navigation is the means by which you offer users and search engines to find their way around your site.

This might include a search facility but we are not concerned with that here because search engines can’t use them. We are interested in your site's internal links.

It’s tempting to let your site’s structure determine your navigation but that’s usually not enough for search engine optimization. Here’s why…

Say you had a travel site like tripadvisor.com and organised all your content by geographical region starting with continents at the top and towns at the bottom, your site’s structure might look something like this:

Continents > Countries > Towns

For example:

Europe > France > Paris

The obvious way to organize your navigation might be to first have a menu to all ‘Continents’ on the home page, perhaps like this menu of links on tripadvisor.com...

...and then on each ‘Continent’ page, a menu to relevant ‘Countries’ like this…

...and then on each ‘Country’ page, a menu to relevant ‘Towns’ like this...

That would be logical but it is not adequate for SEO as some of your town pages are your most important pages, and being deep in your site’s structure they will be many (too many) clicks away from the home page.

The number of clicks a page is away from the home page is important because it largely determines how much (crucial) ‘inbound link power’ it has. This is because most sites’ inbound links are concentrated on the home page and the link power they bring is shared around the site via text links, ie, navigation. So the greater the number of clicks a page is away from the home page, the less link power it gets and the harder it is for the page to rank well on SERPs (search engine results pages).

Which is why for SEO we need to allow search engines to find our most important pages, with as few clicks as possible from the home page. (The same applies for users too – they don’t want to spend a long time searching). So we go beyond navigation by structure and offer menus with direct links to our most important pages.

Back on Tripadvisor, our example travel site, the following menus are offered on the home page to make sure both search engines and users can quickly get to the site’s most important pages:

• The following menu gives links directly from Tripadvisor’s home page to pages listing hotels for its most popular countries and cities…

… note how the link text – the actual words clicked to link – are the keywords the pages are targeting, eg, ‘Chicago hotels’, ‘Venice hotels’. They could simply have used ‘Chicago’ and ‘Venice’, but the pages are linked to get an ‘SEO boost’ for the link text used.

• The following menu gives links directly to a variety of different pages and targets a variety of keywords, revealed to us by the chosen link text, including ‘family vacations’, ‘golf vacations’ and the names of some countries and cities with no modifying keywords like ‘hotels’ or ‘vacation’.

• With this last menu from Tripadvisor, they are linking to some very specific places with long keywords: