ib tutor,tutorial-Tune up your navigation for SEO

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Tune up your navigation for SEO By: Wilkinson Smith

Your site's navigation can be a valuable asset in your search engine optimisation plan. With just a few tune-ups, the way your navigation is displayed on each page can help the search engines find their way around and even add to a page's keyword relevance. Almost every site can benefit from a navigation tune-up. In most cases, navigation is designed to look good. This often gets in the way of optimisation. Talk to us at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk about how site architecture affects SEO.

Optimising the navigation bar Your navigation bar is one of the first things a search engine spider should come to when they begin to crawl your page. That is, if it has been formulated properly. Many sites embed their menu in impressive technology that looks good but actually hides the site navigation from the search engines.

It's important to keep your navigation in a text-based format to ensure that the search engines can find their way around. Plant your keywords in anchor text, but try to keep it natural. If your menu bar looks stuffed with keywords, it probably is. Sitemaps and site maps Having a site map somewhere on your site is a great way to ensure that human users and search engine spiders can easily find their way around your site. It's also a good way of straightening out your navigation.

In order for your site map to be easily readable for the search engines, it's vital to put it in a basic text form with hyperlinks. Some companies make the mistake of making their site maps too visual, and while this looks pretty, embedding links in images doesn't tell the search engines enough about the link. A good site map will be an ordered list of your pages, using keywords as link anchors where you can.

The other form of site map, the XML Sitemap, is a good way to notify the search engines of changes to your site as they happen. It can be a good idea to discuss this particular map with your search engine optimisation company to ensure you formulate it correctly. Talk to our staff at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk for more advice. It is important to ensure that there is a link to your site map from every page. This ensures that the search engine spiders can climb from one page to another very swiftly. It also assists users when they become lost.

A word of caution Websites are getting bigger and bigger. It's necessary these days to have hundreds of pages in order to have enough clout to compete on a global scale. With these hundreds of pages, however, come hundreds of links, if you're determined to feature your pages everywhere in your navigation. This can cause a problem.

It is fairly well known that Google tends to filter out pages that hold more than 100 links. This is due to the many spam sites around the net which are nothing but link farms. With large sites, it's important to be selective with navigation, and keep all pages within a reasonable link boundary. This will be appreciated by your site's users also.