One of the things that I always look at whenever I am working on a project is the navigation of a site. I will be honest with you, creating the perfect most intuitive navigation on a site is something that I don’t think has yet been done.
However, there are some things that you can check to make sure that your on page navigation is as helpful as possible to both search engines and people.
1). Plain HTML Links
JavaScript is not needed to create links in your navigation. We have an HTML tag that can do it for you. It looks like this: <a href=”linktopage”>anchor text</a> Use that. Search engines like it, people who have disabled JavaScript like it, you cannot lose.
2). Obvious
Make your navigation obvious. If I visit a site and I can’t easily work out how to find what I want, I am probably not going to come back. Ever. Not really an SEO issue this one.
3). Useful
Provide useful navigation. What are the main areas of your site? Have them in the navigation. What are the useless things that you have there because you think they look cool - the Java applet that makes your logo look like it is being reflected on water? Not useful and clouds up the navigation.
4). Don’t mix up ads and navigation.
Don’t make ads look like they are part of the navigation of your site. Not only do some advertisers frown upon the idea of this, it means that unless your sole revenue stream is adverts, you lose potential sales / leads.
5). Include a search function.
No matter what you do, your navigation won’t be easy for everyone to use. So include a search option so people can search your site for what they need.
Please pay attention to your navigation. It is important from both an SEO and user perspective.
James
SEO Programmer
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation | No Comments »
One topic that hasn’t been discussed here for a while, and can have an important role in SEO, is accessibility. If a website isn’t accessible for all users, it can not only lead to unhappy potential customers/clients, but can also lead to fines and restrictions on your website. However, accessible websites can often be quite boring and can affect visitor longevity and useability. Finding the right balance is therefore important and rewarding to the website owner and visitors.
When designing a new website, many designers and developers don’t bother to consider less able users who can represent a surprisingly large portion of your customer base (particularly the elderly, a large group with spendable income, who are becoming more computer literate and active in the online market place). They are also forgetting to consider that there has been recent government legislation recommending particular accessibility standards to adhere to, failure of which to do so can lead to bad publicity and even lawsuits.
In my experience the best way to ensure your website is accessible is to initially plan and build the website with simple core-features, making sure each one can be used in a completely accessible manner. An easy way of doing this would be to design the structure imagining that things like CSS, JavasScript and the like didn’t exist. Once this is done you can start to think about adding more advanced features out of JavaScipt, Flash, etc. to the accessible “base”. However, it is important you ensure that these “luxury” scripts are unobtrusive and will degrade gracefully.
In conclusion, if you make sure you follow the rules outlined by the Web Accessibility Initiative, you can rest assured your site can be viewed by the maximum range of web users. Once this is done you can then add the extra luxury features which can help to lead to longer user visits and increased conversions.
Rik
SEO Programmer
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation | No Comments »
