Site Navigation and Search Engine Optimization

Optimizing site navigation for high rankings is easy and very powerful. Follow the recommendations in this article and you will improve your search engine positions.

Graphical menus may look good, but they prevent you from exploiting one of the most important factors - anchor text. Search engines cannot recognize text on images. However, they give a lot of weight to anchor text (the text of your links). Use simple text links for navigation.

Let's say that you optimize your main page for the phrase "keyword1 keyword2". You certainly have no benefit of links such as "products", "information", "articles", "about" etc. Use longer navigational links with the anchor text "keyword1 keyword2 products", "keyword1 keyword2 articles" etc. etc. Put a maximal number of instances of your key phrases in your navigational links. Anchor hits help both the page the link it is placed on, and the page it points to. To accommodate the longer links, you may need to redesign your whole site. Do it. It's worth it.

Your navigational links should look like this: <a href="keyword1-keyword2.htm" title="keyword rich description">keyword rich anchor text</a>. The anchor title tags are given a tiny amount of weight, but it is better to have it, than not.

To do it, follow these two rules:

1. Link to your most important pages from every page of your site using appropriate anchor text
2. PageRank is divided among all links on a page. Remove all unimportant links from every page and you will concentrate your PageRank power into your important pages. For example, you may not need a link to your Contacts page from every other page. For every page, think about which unimportant links you can remove without making your site strange and unusable, and do remove them.

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