Navigation Links Best Practices for SEO
If you want to be successful in search engine optimization (SEO), you need to pay attention to hundreds of SEO ranking factors, small and large. In addition to writing excellent content, building links consistently, and optimizing for strategically targeted keywords, you need to fix and adjust dozens of little variables all over your website. Today, we’re taking a close look at one of these variables: navigation links. What exactly are navigation links and how should you consider them in the context of your SEO strategy? What Are Navigation Links? Take a look at the top of this website. You’ll see a horizontal bar with links to various pages and subpages, titled Services, Tools, Why Us, Blog, and Contact (plus Login and Get Started). These are navigation links. Navigation links are internal links to other pages of your website. What makes them different than other links is that they’re more heavily emphasized. When you visit a website for the first time, navigation links are among the first things you see, and it should make intuitive sense why this is the case; after scrolling through the homepage, users need prompts to figure out where to go next. Obviously, navigation links are important for outlining the content of your website and providing users with meaningful direction so they can find the information they need. But what does this have to do with SEO? Why Are Navigation Links Important for SEO? Navigation links serve many different purposes in the context of your SEO campaign, so it’s important to optimize them to boost your rankings. New webpages. First, remember that each link in your navigation is going to lead to a new page – usually a core page of your website. Each new page of your website is another ranking opportunity, and another chance to optimize for target keywords. Website structure and hierarchy. Google uses bots to crawl the web and index pages. The crawling path plays a role in how your pages are indexed, and therefore, presented in search engine results pages (SERPs). How you structure and name your navigation links can play a role in how Google analyzes and indexes your website. Without proper navigation links, Google may treat every page of your website as having equal footing – which probably isn’t the case. Naming and keyword optimization. How you name your pages and navigation links can also influence your SEO results. This is an opportunity to include target keywords, both for the respective pages in your navigation and your homepage. User experience. Finally, navigation links are an important element of user experience. If your navigation links are sensibly organized, easy to find, and easy to use, your users are going to be more likely to enter the inner pages of your website and spend more time-consuming information. Google rewards websites with positive user experience, so this can support higher rankings as well. Types of Website Navigation Links There are many different possible approaches to the design and presentation of your navigation links. These are the main types that most websites use: Horizontal navigation. At the top of our website, you’ll see an example of horizontal navigation. As the name of this navigation link style suggests, these links are listed in a horizontal fashion. This is one of the most common types of navigations on the modern web, since it works well for a variety of devices and browsers and because it’s both clean and efficient. However, it may not be appropriate if you have an excessive number of links to include. Sidebar navigation. An alternative option is sidebar navigation, where users can find links listed vertically on the side of a website. This is arguably quite similar to horizontal navigation, relegating a relatively short list of links to only one small part of the website – without hiding those links. Hamburger menu navigation. Though this design trend is falling out of fashion, the classic “hamburger menu” navigation was quite popular when designing for mobile devices first rose to prominence. It’s called a hamburger menu because of the three horizontal lines depicting its existence. When users click on the hamburger icon, they can expand a navigation menu that presents them with all the navigation links they need. It’s a compact way to include more navigation links than would otherwise fit, but it forces users to interact before they can see them. Footer navigation. If you scroll to the bottom of this website, you’ll also see an example of footer navigation. Here, you’ll have practically infinite room to list all the navigation links you think are important to your users, without having to worry about those links obstructing the average user experience when perusing your homepage. Dropdown menu navigation. What if you have dozens of links to include in your navigation, but for design purposes, you only want to include a few in the header of your website. One option available to you is the drop down menu navigation; in this setup, you’ll have a handful of major headers in the main part of your navigation. When users hover over these headers or click on them, they’ll produce a submenu of daughter pages associated with this parent page. It’s another way to make your navigation more compact without sacrificing the number of navigation links you want to include. Hybrid approaches. And of course, it’s possible to utilize multiple approaches to navigation links simultaneously, as long as you’re not overcrowding your web design in the process. Case in point, our website utilizes both horizontal header navigation and footer navigation. Best Practices for Navigation Links in SEO So, what are the most important best practices to follow for navigation links in your SEO campaign? Keep your SEO navigation links to a minimum. After reading the rest of this article, you may come up with the idea to include as many navigation links as possible in your main navigation. After all, each one of these pages is a new ranking opportunity, and an opportunity to include