Simple Navigation

Simple navigation and search engine friendly web design are important aspects that forms a part of your SEO strategy, after all like I’ve mentioned search engines are stupid; so we need to offer as much as help as possible to Google, so it can potentially reward us for our efforts with a decent ranking.”Content is the King”, and hence it is always best to use keyword rich anchor text while linking to the pages on and off your website.

The ultimate goal in a simple navigational website is to link as many sub pages to the main landing pages (category) of the website and correctly structure those pages, so that the set of links contained from those pages can be easily found and followed by spiders. Remember, the more sub pages you have from that link to the main landing page, that is the more deeper your category structure is, chances are it will be harder for those pages to be found by spiders & crawlers.

Usually, there are three elements that can be used in a web page’s design:

Header - The header section mainly consists of the major sections of the website that includes the main categories that people usually are looking to click on in order to find information on a website i.e. about us. Try as best as possible to make this keyword rich without damaging website usability.

Footer – The footer links enhances the usability of the site and provides opportunity for promoting secondary/long tail keywords, legal links such as disclaimers, terms and conditions, privacy policy, and interactive URLs, such as contact address, sitemaps, link resources, feedbacks etc. The footer is particularly used when your website usually consists of a lot of flash or Java Script elements, that way search engines still have a chance in understanding your website.

Side links - The side navigation links include category and sub category of specific pages which again helps in the usability issues of the website.

Enhancing Web Design & Page Speed for SEO

Web Design
Web design and creating a search engine friendly navigation is all about getting users and search engines to the content by keeping the web page elements clean, simple, keyword rich and text based. That means that if you have a simple website, your website can be telling spiders “Here, here come look at me!” and they will happily come & take what they please from your website to include in its search results. If you have a decent understanding of CSS and HTML, you should try to control your page elements using these codes therefore reducing unnecessary clutter that would otherwise appear on your website.

Page Speed
The speed of the website can also have some bearing on the overall performance of the website. As indicated in this year’s SEO trends, it will be something that will be included in Google’s algorithm pretty soon. Optimizing caching, minimizing request sizes, reducing image sizes & actually specifying those image sizes, positioning & removing unused & unnecessary code to make the html document flow better, improves the ability to enhance the page speed of your website. It is recommended that each page be <100KB with a load time of 2.5secs per page.

Page Code
Content is what you must be striving to serve the search engine spiders and by creating a search engine friendly code, you would want to let the crawlers have an easy time crawling your web pages and the content and links therein, subsequently helping them navigate to the other linked pages of the website. Try to get the content as high as possible in the HTML page source and avoid on the page mark-up styles, such as font tags, inline formatting, heading styles, borders, colors, etc. and try replacing them with external CSS files.

Move the JavaScript codes into a single external JavaScript file further helping in optimizing your code. Implementing these strategies will help in reducing the HTML code, make the page size smaller, less complex and therefore will help to get the page load faster.