Navigation refers to the system of links on your website designed to guide, or navigate, your site visitors as they move from web page to web page to interact with your web content.
One of the objectives of comprehensive search engine optimization is to ensure that the architecture of your website – the organization and placement of hyperlinks – is easy to use and easy to follow for both your site visitors and the search engine bots that also follow the links to scan and index your web pages.
Websites that suffer from a poor a navigational structure cause many problems. Site visitors who are unclear or who are expected to click too many links before arriving at the information they desire will often abandon the website altogether in frustration. Search engine bots can also experience access issues. Some badly designed navigation paths cause the search engine bot to go around and around as if caught in a web or an eddy without ever reaching the web content to scan and index it. As a result, the web page will not be indexed in the search engine’s results pages.
Search engine optimization ensures your website navigation allows both site visitors and search engines to access your web pages and easily follow links to your additional web content. It also helps to improve site “stickiness” – the amount of time a site visitor spends at your site – by providing by an intuitive structure to interact with your quality web content.
