The navigation of a website is an important aspect. A site with easy and intuitive navigation structure allows the site visitors to easily find and reach the pages that they want. Apart from it's implication in User Interface, it also assists search engines in figuring out which pages are important. Search Engines mainly base their search results on a page level but they also like to take a macro site level view of page's importance. All sites have a home page/index page which is the main page of a site and as the term suggests is the page which is most frequented by visitors. Home page also serves as the base from where visitors are directed to various other sections of the website.
A webmaster must strive to create a naturally flowing and intuitive hierarchy. The user should be able to navigate easily from page to page and section to section. Webmaster should avoid complex webs of internal links in which every page is linked to every page. “Breadcrumbs” – a row of internal links located at top or bottom of site should be used effectively to enable the site visitor to navigate back to main section or home page. Use text links as much as possible as they can be read easily by search engines. Webmasters are also advised to have useful 404 page that guides the user back to a relevant section or page with a link back the home page in case site visitor encounters a broken link or types in an incorrect URL. Generic messages like “page not found” should be avoided and appropriate messages should be used. Also, 404 custom pages should have same look and feel as rest of the website.
Small sites generally have a small number of pages. For a website with lot of content and subject matter, it may be better to divide each subject and its matter in to separate web pages. In ecommerce sites, there are usually hundreds of categories, sub categories and numerous products. In such cases, the site structure may have different directories and pages for each of them. This is will provide logical and physical hierarchy in a site.
A home page may not have (and is not advisable also) to have links to all the pages of a site. In such cases to ensure that visitors and search engine bots are able to know what all pages are there in the website and effectively navigate to pages of their choices, along with a navigation menu, a sitemap is also provided. A sitemap is a webpage that shows the structure of a website and has a hierarchical listing of all the pages. A sitemap has very important implications for Search Engine Optimization. Search Engine bots while visiting a sitemap is able to get a listing of all pages and hence crawl all the web pages. Site visitors can also use sitemap to access in case of difficult in navigation. A sitemap is primarily for human consumption.
An XML Sitemap with a standard defined by Google has also been introduced, which makes it easier for Google bots to crawl through your site.
Sitemaps should be kept up to date to avoid any broken links.
Author: Aniruddha Badola
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