Website Navigation for SEO | How to Design Optimized Site Navigation

Local Navigation Structure

Search engines look at your navigation structure almost like a human would. They assume that your top-level navigation are your most important, core pages. For optimal SEO, your highest value SEO pages should also be in the top-level navigation where possible. If you have layered navigation (sub-nav or side nav under certain top-level), those pages should all be closely related to the top level navigation page that they sit under. Google sees each sub-nav page as most relevant to categories related to the main nav item it sits under.

Main Navigation Order

Your main navigation should be in order of priority starting with the most important pages on the left. For example, on the site nav captured below, the navigation here tells Google that Articles are the 2nd most important page behind the home page. Once your main navigation is determined, make sure to create a user-friendly HTML sitemapand XML sitemap to help Google and visitors understand your optimized new navigation.

301 Redirects

When launching a new version of a website, every page receiving a decent amount of organic search traffic should be redirected if the URL structure is changing to the most relevant page. Scott Nelle’s Simple 301 Redirects plugin offers a user-friendly, easy way to setup redirects in WordPress. I recently changed my website categories, which resulted in changes to automatically created URLs, so here are a few 301 redirects I set up –

After crawling your site, Google saves a copy of the site with your URL structure in it’s database. When searching for a particular query, Google pulls up URLs based on the URLs found the last time it crawled your site. If a searcher clicks on a search result to a URL Google provides to your site and it generates an error because the content no longer exists at that particular URL, Google sees it as a negative experience for the website visitor. Without creating 301 redirects, Google does not know where your content has moved to and watches 404 errors pile up.

Questions? Contact Lauren Perfors today or leave me a comment below and I’ll answer you!