Why navigation is important for search engines

Google uses “navigation” to refer to the structure and organization of pages on your site, including how you organize your links and how you use pagination.

If you’re building a website, it’s important to think about how your visitors interact with it. The navigation of your website can help visitors quickly find the content they want, and it can also help search engines understand what content you think is important. Although Google’s search results are provided at a page level, Google also likes to have a sense of what role a page plays in the bigger picture of the site.

But how do you make sure your site’s navigation is up to snuff?

Google has some tips:

• Make sure your navigation options are clear and simple. Google likes sites that have a clear “you are here” indicator, as well as breadcrumbs that show where a user is on their journey through the site.
• Create an easy-to-understand hierarchy for your pages so that users can easily identify which page contains the information they’re looking for.
• Use internal links to connect related pages together so that users don’t have to click through multiple pages to get the information they need.

Breadcrumb list:

Breadcrumbs are a great way to help your users navigate your site. A breadcrumb is a row of internal links at the top or bottom of the page that allows visitors to quickly navigate back to a previous section or the root page. Many breadcrumbs have the most general page (usually the root page) as the first, leftmost link and list the more specific sections out to the right. We recommend using breadcrumb structured data markup when showing breadcrumbs.

Navigational page for users:

Navigation is a simple page on your site that displays the structure of your website, and usually consists of a hierarchical listing of the pages on your site. Visitors may visit this page if they are having problems finding pages on your site, or they may use it to get an overview of the content available on your site. While search engines will also visit this page, getting good crawl coverage of the pages on your site, it’s mainly aimed at human visitors.

The navigation page is important because it helps users who are new to your site find their way around. It should be simple and easy for users to understand what each link leads to, and how many levels deep that link goes.

It’s also important to remember that search engines will look at this page as well—you want them to be able to navigate through your site easily as well!

Don’t do

If you want to avoid making your website confusing and frustrating, there are a few things to keep in mind.

• avoid creating complex webs of navigation links. For example, linking every page on your site to every other page could create an overly complicated navigation scheme that’s difficult to follow.
• don’t go overboard with slicing and dicing your content (so that it takes twenty clicks to reach from the homepage).

Use text for navigation

When writing JavaScript to control your site’s navigation, use text links for most of the navigation and avoid using JavaScript to change the URL. The URLs should all be visible in the source code and search engines will be able to understand the page more easily.

When you are using JavaScript to create a page, use a elements with URLs as href attribute values, and generate all menu items on page-load instead of waiting for a user interaction.