Navigation Structure: Helping in Better Ranking

As a ship captain traversing the open sea without a good navigation system will surely get lost. Same way, a site with poor navigation structure will cause problems in good search engine rankings. Good site design means a good navigation structure for your web site. This means the visitor can find the information with ease. Thus the navigation structure of a website should be easy.

Some points should be considered to make the structure of a website “Search Engine Friendly” which are as follows:

1. Dynamic Site Navigation – If you are designing a dynamic website (php, asp etc), try make your URLs with less or NO query string. Some URL rewriting techniques should be used to make URLs search engine friendly.

2. Don’t Use Image Links - Try to avoid images for navigational links as we all know search engine spiders don't read text in images. Always use text links for navigation and use CSS.

3. Logo - Most of websites have Logo is on top left. It is good practice to link your logo to home page from every page.

4. Site Map - A few sites are now creating "Site Maps" which is a page which links to all other pages in the site. This is better option if you want to provide visitors with an 'index', and is also appreciated by the major search engines.

5. JavaScript Menus or Links - Do not use JavaScript for your internal linking because search engine spiders do not read text written in JavaScript and will not follow link defined in JavaScript

6. Avoid Links in Flash - Search engine crawlers are not able to index/follow links defined in flash. Graphics add a lot to a Web site, but text leaves a lot more room for links. When you write about a specific topic, product or service on a page, include a link within the text.

7. Frames - Don't use frames. Very few people use them. They not only create a variety of user problems but search engines also have trouble in indexing framed pages.

8. Avoid Image Maps - Do not use image maps for navigation.

Simplest Way to increase Traffic

There are many ways to increase traffic to your website. But the simplest and effective ways is posting blogs. Blog is basically an online journal related to a particular topic. Blogs consist of text, images and links to another blogs and websites too related to our website. The results in a blog appear sequentially. BLOG itself is a website which facilitates users to post their thoughts and suggestions through comments.

Benefits of blogging

• Crawler mainly admires rich content sites and blogs are mainly rich in content as various readers can post their thoughts and also can update those posts. Blogs contains categorized content
• Traffic rate on blogs is more than that of normal websites. As blog is related to particular topic, so it is beneficial for web surfers because they will get the required information.
• Blogs contains the fresh content because blogs content is regularly updated. Both, the readers and search spiders reward fresh content.
• Blogs supports text, images and video, more detailed information and opinions about a particular topic. Blogs can easily link to each other than the websites. So it attracts more incoming links and traffic.

So it is clear that blogs are very important for both the business point of view and seo point of view. Blogs are the cost effective and simple way to increase traffic and incoming links to our website.