SEO is a difficult field.
So many things affect your rankings that often the small things are overlooked.
However, these small things are often the difference between good listings and average listings, so they're worth looking at.
In this article we're going to quickly run through site navigation and how we can utilise it to achieve higher search rankings.
You might think that as long as every page is linked to from somewhere else - search engines will be able to spider it, and to some extent you'd be right.
However, that's just half the story.
It's not just a question of getting each page spidered but it's also about directing the link juice to the places you need it most.
A popular method of site navigation is to list each page in your site on a vertical menu.
While from a usability perspective this makes perfect sense, from a SEO viewpoint it's less useful.
Think about it.
Is your privacy policy really as important as your products page? Well by linking to both pages in equal amount that's basically what you're telling the search engine.
The trick with site navigation is good planning.
The aim is to link to every page on your site, but link to your "important" pages more often (using on-topic text in both the link itself and the text surrounding it).
With this in mind I'll explore a couple of common navigation styles.
Firstly, as mentioned above, we have the vertical (all inclusive) menu where we simply list every page of your website (on every page of your website).
As we briefly explained, this method isn't the greatest in terms of SEO - however we can counteract it by making sure that our body text frequently incorporates (not too frequently mind you)links to the more important pages on our site.
Link juice will be pretty evenly shared throughout your website and those important pages will be given a boost using the extra links in the body of the page.
Secondly we have the expandable menu.
With this menu system we link only to the top level pages from our homepage.
When we click a top level link we jump to that page which then expands the selected node to reveal the available sub options.
This menu system is far better in terms of SEO because we're including far fewer links on each page.
This means that the links we incorporate into our body text will have a far greater amount of link juice applied to them (they're worth more in SEO terms) - which we are then directing to the relevant pages.
This method is very flexible and allows you to match your URL structure to reflect your position within the hierarchy - which is a nice touch.
However, I would recommend that you don't go beyond 4 levels deep as this may affect your listings for your deepest content.
So - before you build you next website think about how you can best structure your navigation.
Your search listings may depend on it!