By Robert Lockard
Welcome to part 5 of our multi-part series on effective search engine optimization practices. Thanks for sticking with me through this fun little series. This is my 12th blog entry on the eHarbor Blog. I’ve had a lot of fun talking about eHarbor’s history, eHarbor’s future, and even several reasons to smile.
We started this series by talking about improving website content, and continued with a post on designing Web page titles and optimizing images. Now we’ll consider how best to organize websites to improve navigation for both search engines and customers.
You can choose a number of ways to organize your website content. Just make sure you’re consistent. Here are some good ideas to optimize your website navigation:
- Create a quick, intuitive navigation system. Allow visitors to click just once or twice from the homepage to find the specific information or services they’re seeking.
- Be careful not to link every page to every other page. This can cause confusion. Provide relevant links to other pages, but don’t go overboard.
- Stick with text-based links to navigate your site. Using Flash or drop-down menus can make it difficult for search engines to crawl through your site.
- Include a list of your main categories on the sidebar of each page. This can help visitors quickly browse through topics without having to return to the homepage often.
- Use well-designed URLs, as we discussed in the last blog entry in this SEO series. If people cut off part of your URL, try to make it so it will still lead them to part of your website. For instance, if you take this blog entry’s URL www.eharborinc.com/blog/2009/02/03/what-eharbor-is-and-
why-it-matters-to-you and cut off the last part so you are left with www.eharborinc.com/blog/2009/02, the link still works.
It’s also a good idea to include a sitemap on your website to boost usability to site visitors and visibility to search engines. There are two kinds of sitemaps that have two different functions: HTML sitemaps and XML Sitemaps. XML Sitemaps usually have a capital S to differentiate them from HTML sitemaps, so I’ll follow that rule.
An example of a sitemap can be found on the Real Estate Promoter website: www.realestatepromoter.com/index.php?base=site. This sitemap lists all of the main pages and their subcategories in a clear, concise manner. It is best to organize your website by subject matter, putting specific materials under appropriate categories. If you were selling real estate on your website, you could use something like this for your setup:
Homepage -> Properties for sale -> Waterfront homes, condos, rental units and other specific property types
HTML sitemaps are mainly designed for website visitors, not necessarily for Google, MSN, Yahoo or other search engines. Search engines can use them to understand the context of pages on your website, but they should be focused on helping your visitors find what they’re looking for if they get lost.
XML Sitemaps are much better at providing information about your site to search engines. You should consider using a Sitemap if:
- You recently created your site. Google often finds sites through links from one Web page to another, so new sites with no inbound links are almost invisible to it. A Sitemap allows search engines to find your website, even if it is relatively new.
- Your site has dynamic content like AJAX or Flash.
- Your site has a large number of archived pages that are not linked together.
A Sitemap gives search engines a great deal of information, including:
- How often your Web pages are updated with new content. Blogs and other content-dense sections of your website can gain more attention this way.
- Which pages are more important than others, in terms of hierarchy. Your homepage would have the highest ranking, while categories would be slightly below it, and materials under those categories would be a little lower. This helps search engines understand the context of Web pages, but it doesn’t affect a page’s search-engine ranking if it is ranked below other pages on the site.
If you would like a step-by-step walkthrough to help you set up a Sitemap for your website, check out Google’s Sitemap Generator script.
This is the fifth part of this series. We’re coming close to the end of this series on strong SEO practices. Check out the Submit Solution website for more ideas on building SEO on your website. We’ve got plenty of other great ecommerce topics to talk about, as well. Check out Google’s SEO Starter Guide for more information on this topic. The photo of the messy garage in Tokyo is from Flickr and it is the copyright of coccu.
But there are several steps you can take before you go to the experts to make sure your site does precisely what you want it to. These steps come from an Examiner article entitled, “Website design starter plan for clients.” That article has horrible spelling and grammar, but it has a few good ideas I want to share, so I’ll cut its author a little slack.