Are you worried about rankings and growing organic traffic? How about improving your website bounce rate? This article will help you improve your website’s SEO and user experience with better navigation.
5 Tips to Create Descriptive Navigation
Navigation should be descriptive. Labels like “Products” or “Services” are generic to all websites and do nothing to communicate with visitors. In fact, if you focus or specialize in a specific kind of travel, you should make this clear in your navigation. Isn’t “road trips” more descriptive than “travel”?
Step 1) Review your navigation. It’s recommended by top SEO’s to have no more than 6 top navigation items. If you do, then move tabs like “Work with Us” “About Us” and “Contact Us” to your secondary navigation or to your footer. If someone wants to contact you, or learn about you or work with you and they don’t find it in the top navigation, they know to scroll down to your footer.
Y Travel Blog is a great example of a clean navigation that is simple and easy. It’s consistent with the theme of the site and makes it very simple for users to know where to start.
You can then see, they’ve added more navigation options at the footer. This has allowed them to offer all the navigation to pages they want, but keep their header clean.
Step 2) Think about how you can consolidate your navigation into categories. Create a navigation that allows your readers a starting point and that helps Google know your content.
Search engine algorithms favor sites with fully descriptive navigation. Search engines look at all link text (onsite and offsite).
Tip: Your footer should not look like your sitemap. Duplicate links in the footer and sidebar of homepage pointing to the same pages or posts is a bad thing.
Step 3) Group relevant topics under separate, fully descriptive labels. For example, all destinations should be under one tab.
If you sell a product or service, try to include the keyword in your top navigation. These links are considered the best possible anchor text you can link back to on other pages of your site that focus on the product. If you sell many products, label the tab “Travel Products” and create a sub navigation that links to each travel product.
Tip: When you click on a navigation button everything on the next page must be relevant to that tab. Search engines look at this link text. This means that search engine algorithms favor sites with fully descriptive navigation.
Step 4) Create sub-navigation under main navigation links if necessary (it can be drop down or click-through).
Step 5) Link all posts to the most relevant page. This means that posts about a specific topic, product, resource, destination, should link (point) at the most relevant page. This gives the main page (sometimes called cornerstone content) the most authority.
Tip: Google and Bing don’t like over-optimization. You do not want to link to pages if the content isn’t relevant. If you linked every post on your site to one page, but all the pages aren’t relevant, it would be over-optimization.
Bottom Line: Switch to fully descriptive navigation. You will see better rankings and user engagement.
In just a few steps learn how you can improve your website’s SEO and user experience with descriptive navigation by using better header tags and navigation.
Ready for more tips to grow traffic to your travel blog? Check out How To Get Your Travel Blog On The First Page Of Google for Free
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