Create a Website That Ranks: Part 4 – Site Navigation

Site Navigation

One of the most powerful things you can do to make your site rank is how links are distributed ***within your site!*** While most of the SEO advice on the internet is talking about “on-page” factors, sitemaps and link building, etc., (and these are important…) the site navigation that you build your site with and then use to focus attention from customers and the search engines is one of the most important SEO steps you can take.

Planning With Site Navigation in Mind

One way of looking at it is like this. What site naturally has major authority in the given subject area you are covering? Yours! So internal links to and from your most “important” pages will help other pages on your site rank.

Shaun Anderson over at Hobo SEO use an easy to understand analogy to describe this. Think of links like a heat transfer system.

To quote, “Links are like lasers. When you link to a page, you heat the page you are linking to. If your site was measured in heat, you could see the heat-map of your site pages, once all the links have been accounted for.

Links to a Page Heat It Up

You control where the heat is by which pages you you choose to link to and by which pages you link from – it’s a simple premise which seems to get results.

Once you have created a search engine friendly navigation system for your website and Google has crawled and indexed it, you now have “hot” and “cold” pages according to Google.

Internal Links Transfer the Most Heat

Hot pages are created when you link to them. The more you link to them the hotter they get. The more links to a page from the others, the hotter that page.

Typically, you’re home page is hotter than the rest of the site, and indeed this is generally the hottest page on the site. In my example, I only have a couple of real sales pages – the rest are just introductory pages to my sales pages – these are generally a bit more targeted and geared to the theme of this site – seo. Anybody interested in my services or looking to hire the company will definitely want to read these pages so I make sure I tell Google, these are important pages I’d actually like the visitor to be presented with.

In the model above, I wanted to ensure my sales pages were the hottest pages on the site, so made sure my site tells the search engine this. If I can’t be bothered telling a search engine what’s the most important pages on my site, can I expect Google, Yahoo or MSN to figure it out for themselves? Actually, Google wants you tell them what’s the hottest pages on your site in Webmaster Tools these days.

Sure, you want as many pages in the main index as possible. A new site however doesn’t have a lot of heat to spread around, so ensure your sales pages are optimized properly and are the hottest pages in your structure, because odds are some pages will be marked “cold” and put into the supplemental index.

Cooler pages can be drawn into the main index by increasing the heat of your site root by getting links from other websites – other hot spots.

You can heat up a cold page by linking to it from the home page.

I make sure my “hot pages” are as optimized as possible for the type of search engine result pages I’m chasing at any given time.

At the beginning of projects, I like to get a handle on which pages are or need to be hot, especially with new sites or sites without a lot of link-love. You can’t control much, but this you can do.

Thinking like this when I am thinking about navigation helps me, I think, build a site for visitors, which is the ideal scenario. I want visitors to see my sales pages. Same with Google.

Once you’ve optimized a site, it’s time to get those hot pages optimized for your main keywords and get some links from other sites.”

Read more: Optimize Internal Website Navigation For Google | Hobo