2. Mapping out your site
Incorporating a sitemap into your website will tell both the search engines and site users where they should go to find the necessary information. Submitting that sitemap directly to search engines will speed up the process of submission and inclusion into the search engine. Google weight a good navigation structure on a website very highly ? if their search engine spider can't easily find all the pages then they won't get indexed but more importantly how are people who are just glancing through the site going to know where to go?There are some best practices that can be laid out when building navigation into a website. One is to have a main navigation at the top and then sub-navigation for each of the website's sections. Another is to have CSS styled menus which expand to show all the links on the site. There are benefits to both options such as CSS styled navigation gives you the ability to always be one click away from the page you want and sub-nav sections gives you the ability to separate content for users to easily understand. Whatever option you choose you need to make sure that your navigation is created in HTML and that all the links go to all the right pages. Flash, image and some Javascript menus effect the efficiency of your navigation when it comes to search engines. The best practices to adhere to are:- Create links that are descriptive
- Try to link to one page for one subject, don't link e-commerce services and SEO services to the same page
- Include breadcrumbs on your site so both the user and the search engine have a reference point when they go deep into your website
- Author
- Andrew Gaukrodger
- Title
- Date
- Article added 14th October 2008
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