"Search Engine Optimization Guide" Four make your site easier to navigate

Source: Internet
Author: User

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The navigation of a Web site helps users find what they want faster. It can also help search engines understand the weight of site content division. Although Google search results will be listed on a single page, Google is more likely to want a more intuitive expression of the role of each page in your site.

Almost all sites have a homepage or root page, which is often the starting point for users to access content on your site, and is also accessed most frequently. Unless your site has a very simple Web page, think about how your visitors can get from a basic page (your home page) to a subpage that contains more specific content. When you have enough pages around a particular topic, do you have a page where you can describe the relationship of the relevant pages more clearly? (For example: Root page-related topic list-specific topic) Do you have hundreds of products that need to be categorized by multiple categories and subcategories?

The directory structure of our small web site about baseball cards

A site map (sitemap, lower case, for example, a hedge fantasy site map) can easily show the structure of your site, it is often a layered list of your site pages. If users can't find some pages of your site, they can visit the site map to try their luck. Although this site map is primarily intended for users, search engines will also visit your site map to gain a broader range of crawls to your site.

You can also make it easier for Google to find the content of your site by submitting an XML-formatted sitemap (uppercase, such as a Web site map) to Google via Google Webmaster tools. Using a sitemap file is also a (but not guaranteed) way to tell Google which URL format you prefer, (for example: do you prefer http://brandonsbaseballcards.com/or http://? www.brandonsbaseballcards.com/to see more domain preference information here. Google also provides an open-source sitemap generation script to help you make site map files easier for your site. If you want to know more about the site map, you can go to the Webmaster Help Center to get more useful guidance.

Site Navigation Optimization Practical experience

Make navigation more natural and hierarchical-making it easier for users to access the basics to what they want and what is more specific to your site. Add a navigation page to make your site's internal link structure more intuitive and efficient. However, you need to avoid:

Create extremely complex navigation link pages, such as creating links to all other pages above.

You've gone too far to cross-link your content over and over again. (so that you have to click 20 times to reach a deeper page)

Try to use plain text to create navigation-try to achieve navigation between your page and the page through plain text links, and there is an advantage to make it easier for search engines to understand your site and achieve easy crawling. Many users also prefer other navigation methods, especially if some devices do not support flash and JavaScript. Or remind you to avoid:

Navigation is based entirely on drop-down menus, pictures, or animations. (most but not all search engines can identify a site such as navigation, but if a user can access all pages of the site through ordinary text links, this can improve the ease of use of your site; you can see how Google recognizes non-text files here.) )

Use breadcrumbs-"breadcrumbs" is a row of internal links at the top or bottom of a page that allows visitors to quickly return to the previous page or first page. Many "breadcrumbs" first have a basic page (often the root page) on the left and then a more specific section on the right.

In our example site, a breadcrumbs link on a deeper page.

Place an HTML site Map page and an XML-formatted sitemap file on your site-it is useful to place a simple sitemap on your site that links to all or most important pages. If you want to make sure that the search engine finds pages on your site, you can create an XML-formatted sitemap. Just be careful to avoid the following problems:

Your THML-formatted site map lists some dead links that are outdated or broken down.

In your HTML format site map, simply list all the pages but not better organize them (for example, through a certain topic).

Think carefully about what happens when a user removes a portion of your Web URL--Some users may be looking at your Web page in a very strange way, and you need to anticipate that. For example, a user who is likely to ignore the breadcrumbs that you add to the Web page, instead of a part of the URL last year, is hoping to access more common content. He or she may be accessing http://www.brandonsbaseballcards.com/news/2008/upcoming-baseball-card-shows.htm and then entering http://in the browser address bar www.brandonsbaseballcards.com/news/2008/, he thought it would get all the articles on your website published in 2008. Does your site display these content in this case (published in 2008)? Or you can provide a user with a 404 ("Page Cannot access" error) prompt. or let the user input the wrong URL to automatically jump to http://www.brandonsbaseballcards.com/news/?

There is a helpful 404 page--users often go to some non-existent pages in your site through some broken links or by typing the wrong URL. If there is a personalized 404 page can be very friendly to guide users back to the available pages, which can greatly improve the user experience. Your 404 pages can have a link to the root page, or you can provide links to some of the most popular or relevant content on your site. In this way, Google has provided a 404 tool (This is the latest Google release features, the translator) can be a number of useful features for your 404 pages automatically achieve automatic popular matching. You can also use Google Webmaster tools to find the sources that are causing the 404 error. You might want to avoid:

Allow your 404 pages to be indexed by search engines. (When a nonexistent page receives an access request, make sure your server is configured with a 404HTTP status code.) )

Just provide some information like "no find", "404", or even 404 pages.

Design some content that doesn't have anything to do with the rest of the site for your 404 pages.

Source: Google Webmaster Blog

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