One of my favorite clients has a nightmare of a website. He knows this because I’ve told him several times. We don’t mince words with one another and it’s just a matter of not knowing when he started out how very important your website’s navigational design is to SEO.
More than ever, search engines are focusing on “customer experience.” They want their search spiders (or bots) to fly through a site, figure out what it’s about, and move on. They don’t want any difficulty in searching your site, and worst of all, no spider traps!
Spider traps are loops that create many, many pages that don’t actually exist on the site. This usually happens with dynamic content — content that visitors see, which varies depending on set parameters.
That’s more technical than I actually wanted to get here. What I want you to understand is that your navigational design should be linear and clearly defined. Here’s what I saw when I went to one site:
Home page – product category page – product category page in store – product page – order page.
This should have been Home page – Product category page – Product page with a buy button.
No page on your site should be more than 3 clicks from the home page. So, it could actually have another page in there, but why? Keep your navigational design as simple as possible!
XML Sitemaps Are Crucial
And when you’re finished creating your site, create a sitemap. No, not the kind that visitors see, but one that spiders see — an XML sitemap that lists every page in your website. Then, register it with Google Webmaster Tools. And be sure to update it often, if your site is static HTML. As your site grows, so should your XML sitemap.
This is why I love WordPress for simplicity. It has Home, category, and posts or pages, and also home, tag, and posts or pages. Simple. But it’s also very easy to create a killer sitemap automatically with WordPress SEO by Yoast, which also keeps your sitemap up-to-date.
The bottom line is to use a design that is easy to navigate. If you get spiders upset, they may not index your site properly, but that’s a side issue. Your clients don’t want the hassle, either. If your site is too hard to navigate, you’re most definitely losing sales.
Hey there! I just wanted to ask if you ever have any issues with hackers? My last blog (wordpress) was hacked and I ended up losing months of hard work due to no data backup. Do you have any methods to prevent hackers?
Hello bracelet person. Love my bracelets, too. 🙂
Yes. In 2007, a blog I’d been writing in for 2 years was hacked. It wasn’t the blog, though, it was my hosting account. I had an independent hosting company, which was a big mistake. I stick to HostGator now, and really love their service. I moved right after that attack happened and have had no issues since.
The hacker(s) wiped out my databases — all of them. So, blogs, affiliate programs, tracking software the whole bit. I wasn’t a happy camper. The hosting company didn’t have a backup, and neither did I. (Bad idea. Always back up your blog and your server.)
There are several different security options. One of my clients uses Bulletproof Security and it’s very robust. If you want something really hard to crack, I’d say that’s it. There’s also WordPress Security Lab. I bought a license last week, but it wasn’t playing nice with my other plugins. Try it, but if something goes nuts after you install it, deactivate it or if you can’t get into that page, go through FTP and delete the plugin. I haven’t tried or tested any other software, but in my mind, Bulletproof is probably the way to go. The guy who recommends it is a former hacker, now working for a big corporation on the good guy side. 🙂
Hope that helps!
Pat