Now that your basic navigation structure it set, it’s time to optimize the navigation for the search engines. Whenever you can, use keywords in your navigation. This will help improve your rankings, especially Google. Here are two examples of how to improve your navigation.

Let’s say you offer different sizes of metal stamping service. You could do your navigation like this -

• Small Stamping
• Medium Stamping
• Large Stamping

This would help you rank for small stamping, medium stamping, and large stamping. However, if you changed it to this -

• Small Metal Stamping
• Medium Metal Stamping
• Large Metal Stamping

You will also help you rank higher for metal stamping, small metal stamping, medium metal stamping, and large metal stamping. Here’s why. The search engines give credit to a page for the keywords in the links that are pointing to them. In other words, if Google sees the words metal stamping in a link to your metal stamping page, they will rank that page higher for metal stamping. It doesn’t matter if the links are internal or external.

Here’s where it gets even better. All of your pages will get a boost in the rankings for those keywords when they’re added to the navigation! The search engines give more weight to words that are in links, so we’ve really improved the visibility for “metal stamping” throughout the site.

As you can see, your navigation plays an important role in your website’s success. Just a few small changes to your navigation can make a big difference in how your site ranks in the search engines.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 at 11:26 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.