SEO 101 Refresher Part 1: Navigation
This will be the first part of a series of back to the basics, SEO 101 for the new year.
A site's navigational system is the webbing the holds your site together. Like a web, there may be multiple threads linking to other threads together providing a diverse and sound structure.
In SEO a site's navigation plays a significant role in letting the search engines know what a page is supposed to be about. For example, if you sell clothes, proper linking to your new leather sandals page has several advantages:
1. A link from the home page assures your new leather sandals page will be crawled more quickly than if it was buried three levels deep.
2. Using the proper anchor text "men's leather sandals" instead of an image or "click here" allows the home page to describe what the page on the other end of the link is about.
3. Interconnecting the new leather sandals page from already established shoe and sandal pages helps to lend credibility and helps to describe what the page is about.
When linking, make sure that your links are static and not created virtually. You can tell if your links are static by using the "view source" feature in your browser on your pages and seeing if your links each have an href="pagenamehere.html" or href="pagenamehere.php", etc. If you cant see the link in the source code, neither can the search engines and this needs to be corrected by your web developers. In the mean time, while you wait for a fix for your dynamic navigation, you can place your links inside of noscript tags. Keep in mind when placing your links inside of the noscript tags that they will be visible to visitors who do not have JavaScript enabled.
A site's navigational system is the webbing the holds your site together. Like a web, there may be multiple threads linking to other threads together providing a diverse and sound structure.
In SEO a site's navigation plays a significant role in letting the search engines know what a page is supposed to be about. For example, if you sell clothes, proper linking to your new leather sandals page has several advantages:
1. A link from the home page assures your new leather sandals page will be crawled more quickly than if it was buried three levels deep.
2. Using the proper anchor text "men's leather sandals" instead of an image or "click here" allows the home page to describe what the page on the other end of the link is about.
3. Interconnecting the new leather sandals page from already established shoe and sandal pages helps to lend credibility and helps to describe what the page is about.
When linking, make sure that your links are static and not created virtually. You can tell if your links are static by using the "view source" feature in your browser on your pages and seeing if your links each have an href="pagenamehere.html" or href="pagenamehere.php", etc. If you cant see the link in the source code, neither can the search engines and this needs to be corrected by your web developers. In the mean time, while you wait for a fix for your dynamic navigation, you can place your links inside of noscript tags. Keep in mind when placing your links inside of the noscript tags that they will be visible to visitors who do not have JavaScript enabled.
posted by Jeff Martin at
7:05 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home