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Navigational Menu
The navigation that you set up for your Web Site is a very important design element that requires careful planning and forethought.
Acting as the road map for your site, the navigational links and buttons should assist your site users to quickly and easily find the information they are looking for. The navigation of your site also assists the googlebots and spiders to index and log your inner pages. It must be structured in a logical flow-on manner, which takes, not only your site users on a journey through your site, but also the link-following spiders and webcrawlers.
Visitors not only want to know where they are on your site, they also want to know how to get back where they came from and where else they can go. For this reason, each page should be individually titled and specific. If your site users find your navigation difficult, or they cannot find what they came for, they will quickly leave.
For a Search Engine to list your site, if first has to know what your site is about, what your business is about, and the information contained within.
The navigation bar or main menu on a website, which consists usually of the upper level pages, should be clearly titled as to what information they contain so they can be properly indexed by the web robots.
The Search Engine robots will usually enter your site through the Home Page (sometimes called the Index page) and then they travel throughout the site following the links. Your website should be made very easy to navigate for this reason also.
Other navigational aids might be:
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Hyper links - these are highlighted words, which when clicked, will take you to another page or part of the website which closes references the word or phrase you clicked on.
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Navigational buttons act the same way, but more likely will link only from page title to page title.
- Browse buttons, or drop down menus, will list and allow you to directly access each page on the site.
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A Site Map could also be added to any website to improve the navigation. This is, in effect, a Table of Contents. A Google Site Map is now freely available and specifically designed to make navigation easier for both your site user and the Googlebots
Keywords & Key Phrases
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