Does my website’s navigation structure affect SEO?

Yes, the structure of your website’s navigation is indeed an important element to consider when designing your website; not only can it affect SEO, it can also have an impact on the usability of your site.

The structure of your website’s navigation should be designed in such a way that it is logical, with the most important links on the top-level navigation bars, and should not make the visitor think too much.

Visitors may not always land on your home page, so you need to make sure your navigation structure is clear and easy to understand.

Furthermore the content should be logically categorised with broad categories on the top level and niche areas further down in menu. In terms of usability the important content should not be more than three clicks away; otherwise you may find you have a high bounce rate.

By properly planning and improving your website’s navigation structure you are:

• Enhancing the user experience in navigating the website (usability).
• Making it easier for search engine spider to crawl your site and index its pages.
  

It is also necessary to ensure your navigation structure is search engine friendly. Try to avoid using unecessary Flash and JavaScript - they may look fancy but will not help your site to be indexed. If you are still keen on using JavaScript, then make sure that users are able to navigate through the site even if the scripts are blocked or turned off by user settings. Similarly, from an SEO perspective, Flash navigation is not recommended as search engines struggle to read and index it properly.

Another common form of navigation is image-based, meaning images with links to the relevant pages. Search engines can follow an image link provided they are not JavaScript based. If using image based navigation you must ensure that Alt attribute is used to target the keywords you want that page to be indexed for.

Finally, saving the best for last, is a text-based navigation structure, or use of XHTML and CSS, which is search engine friendly and thus comes highly recommended by SEOs. Search engine spiders find it easy to follow and it allows you to include keywords. Whilst it may not be as aesthetically pleasing as Flash or JavaScript navigations, it is probably the best form of navigation for SEO.

If JavaScript, Flash or image-based navigation is used it is vital that an XML sitemap is integrated into your site, as it helps the search engine bots index the pages. The more pages indexed for relevant keywords, the more organic traffic generated.
 
To compliment your website navigation structure, implement bread crumb links e.g. Home > Online Marketing > SEO, as they help to identify the location of a page and make it easily navigable for  visitors as well as ensuring they can find the right information in few clicks.

At I-COM our experienced web designers and SEO team can help you to restructure your website content and navigation so that it is effective, whilst at the same time meeting SEO and search engine requirements.