In our last post about making seo friendly file names we looked at how you can get a little boost in web searches by naming your files optimally so “urban-t-shirts.html” as opposed to “page23.html”. In this post we’ll look at how by extension we can build our site navigation to link all our relevantly titled pages together.

It goes without saying that our navigation, its functionality, titles and positioning should be clear and designed in a way that encourages your customers to purchase your products. I recommend you buy the Don’t Make Me Think from Amazon. It does a great job of helping you get a visitor friendly site navigation in place. It’s a short read with great screen shots. Worth your while if you are looking to improve your site navigation.

Make the title of your navigation items obvious, clear and keyword rich, leave your site visitor in doubt as to what they are going to find when they click the link. Put your site navigation in a place where the visitor expects to see it and have it work in a way that doesn’t make your prospective customer jump through hoops.

You’ll find that as you progress that everything on your site and its search engine visibility and success is interlinked. Coding is key to your site, consistent file naming to include keywords, naming navigational items using the same keywords as the page they link should all follow through logically.

How your navigation system is coded is also important as it is the method by which not only your customers but also the search engine progress through your site. If you have a complex drop down system that is activated by rollovers it can be tricky to use and depending how it is coded difficult for search engines to read.

Now as well as your regular site navigation it can be helpful to the search engines to have text links of all the pages on your site readily available, whether that be on your home page or on a site map page, it doesn’t matter, just so long as it is accessible.

We’ll touch on this as we post more but the use of Cascading Style Sheets can provide you with an attractive, search engine friendly option for your site navigation. For a brief overview check out http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/css/css-navigation-menu.shtml.

So get someone who hasn’t visited your site to check it out. See how they move through the site. See how quickly they go to your store, that’s where you want them to go. And when they’re finished ask them about the site, what they thought, how easy it was to get round, did the links made sense?

Sometimes we just get too close to our sites, things make sense to us but they may not to people who don’t know our brand or what we are trying to convey with our site.

Site navigation not only serves as a route for the search engines to move through your site but also for your customers and having a logical, keyword rich and descriptive site navigation will not only help raise your search engine profile but will just as importantly help to convert more site visitors into customers.

So in closing does your site navigation make sense?
Does it clearly convey what is under each link?
Is it easy to you?
Is it keyword rich?

Till next time

[Disclaimer: Unless you are in re-building mode don't do this with existing files names on your site. You may lose traffic. It's a good either either to get another domain and start there or put it into place with each new site page you create.]

Filenames: what do they matter. In and of themselves not a huge amount but as part of a correctly structured site the can make a difference if you make them relevant to the content of your page and at the same time keyword relevant.

[Disclaimer: Unless you are in re-building mode don't do this with existing files names on your site. You may lose traffic. It's a good either either to get another domain and start there or put it into place with each new site page you create.]

First off let’s talk about regular sites. Now there are many ways to name a file. You can name it so it’s recognizable to you and easy to add to the site navigation. How about making it rec0gnizable to your customers and also the search engines.

So you have a bunch of searches in front of you for urban t shirts, they look similar, they all show what you’re after what url are you going to pick?

www.clothingcompanydomain.com/page23.html or

www.clothingcompanydomain.com/urban-t-shirts.php

Now this goes for the search engines themselves, they give a little boost to that added relevance given by your filenames. Now obviously these same keywords and relevant text should factor into your page also but it can help establish your brand in the market areas you’re looking to reach.

This also cuts the other way. As well as making pages relevant to what markets you are searching for you can also research other clothing related terms to find which areas may have a committed following or large amount of searches.  The SEO Book Keyword Suggestion tool is great for this, just type in a keyword and it will tell you how many searches there are on a specific topic.

Just remember a small amount of searches is not necessarily a bad thing. If you can own a niche market you will get customers.

Once you have this down you can assign a unique keyword set and filename for every page on your site, giving you greater visibility across a range of searches and the likelihood you will attract more, relevant traffic and more motivated buyers to your site.

Keywords in filenames perform an important element in helping your brand to reach more customers. It is helpful if you use the dash as search engines then are aable to separate words individuallly, so preferably urban-t-shirts.html not urbantshirts.html or urban_t_shirts.html although as you can see here with relevance any format can work. http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=urban+t+shirts

For blogs the same thing applies. WordPress for instance has several filename format. The default ones are assigned by the database so look like /?p=123 but with plugins such as Permalinks you can create meaningful file names like the one for this post seo-tips-file-names. This is a good idea also to get in place on launch.

So something to consider next time you create a new page on your site. It may not change the world but over time it will help as part of your web marketing process.

If you have any questions about this post just email info at groovesk8.com.