The Foundation for Navigating Your Website to Success: How to Make Your Site Navigation Work for You

A website is not as simple as it looks on your desktop screen. It has paths and links which are connected by codes. Without proper coding and navigation plan, a website loses its effectiveness. The more simple are the paths of a website, the more it’s easy for the visitors to room from one page to another. According to Small Business Trends, 94% of consumers prefer sites with easy navigation.

Navigation Guide for Your Website

Navigation plays a crucial part in the ranking of a website. The foremost goal of website navigation is to enhance the user experience, which in return signals positively to Google algorithms.

Improve Internal Linking Structure

Have you ever thought why the word “website” is given to these digital closets of information? Because all the parts of a digital site are connected like an actual web. Any broken string or link reduces the viability of websites.

To improve the navigation of a website, add a minimum of 3 internal links to each webpage. Google bots use these internal links to crawl through your website. Besides that, it also becomes easy for visitors to navigate through your site.

Design Your Navigation Hierarchy

A website is more like a maze with many paths and checkpoints. Poor navigation makes it worse to retain visitors. The homepage is an entry point which gives users access to the rest of the parts.

Careful division of the parts of your website into categories and sub-categories makes it comfortable for the users to explore your site. For instance, a beauty blog must define categories for its vlogs, blogs, product, and accessories into categories and sub-categories.

Include a Search Function and Minimize Drop-down Menus

No matter what is the purpose of your website, always place a search button at the top of your website. To make this search button work effectively connect all the categories and sub-categories to the search button. Some developers make it difficult to find the searched items, which annoys the visitors and leave them with a sour taste.

Moreover, drop-down menus are space-saving, but they are not always the easiest to use. Too many options in the drop-down menus occupy unnecessary space when used and do nothing useful for the visitors.

Design a Compact Menu

As a website age, tons of new content is added, and as a rule of thumb, a site with excellent navigation doesn’t have stray content. Instead of making thousands of main categories, divide these categories into smaller sub-categories. The main menu of your website should not exceed more than ten main categories. However, most of the SEO experts suggest keeping the main menu to a maximum of 7 categories.

Improve Anchor Text and Add Clickable Navigation Links

Anchor texts give a hint about the content of the webpage; a user is about to explore, and anchor texts made up of codes reduces its effectiveness. Don’t ignore the importance of clickable navigation links as well because they also facilitate the navigation.

Add Side Bars and Footer

Sidebars and footers can play an essential role in achieving excellent navigation. Footer has a good amount of space to add relevant information. You can use it to add contact details, social links, and different fields.

Add Sticky Navigation Options

Sticky navigation options are also excellent for visitors. They provide easy access to different categories of a website. Sticky navigation items stick to their place and do not go away during website navigation. A small button for Back, Top, or Bottom can be made for sticky navigation.

Bottom Line

Do not compromise the user experience over SEO or product placement. While designing or improving the navigation structure of your website, always keep in mind that you made this website for users, not for yourself. I hope these practices will help you to design an excellent navigation structure for your site.

Internet Digital Marketing has been helping businesses just like yours achieve all their business goals since 1997.  We have over 25 years’ experience in SEO, lead generation, online marketing and web design.  We are affordable, deliver results that make a difference, and we will you grow your business.

To learn more about how IDM can help your business and create a custom SEO program for you contact us at (214) 504-1919, or visit https://www.internetdigitalmarketing.com/consultation/ today!