Website Navigation Mistakes – Two Big Mistakes of Website Navigation

There are two big mistakes that get made when it comes to website navigation. The first is that websites use JavaScript and Flash menus. The second is that websites use deep navigation structure. Spiders have trouble crawling JavaScript and Flash links. Some can do it, but the vast majority will instead choose to ignore them all together. The best alternative is to opt for XHTML and CSS menus. If you have to use images for your menus, then make sure you optimize the file names and make proper use of the alt and title attributes.

Deep Navigational Structures of Website Navigation

The other major problem is deep navigational structures. This refers to how many clicks it takes to get to your website’s deepest content. If you have to go through too many clicks, then there’s a chance that search engines will ignore and eventually stop indexing your content as frequently. The best practice to fix this is to make your website’s structure shallow. According to some SEO experts, it should only take a maximum of three to four clicks to get from your website’s homepage to your deepest content. An added bonus of a shallow structure is that it increases your website’s user friendliness, which can decrease your website’s bounce rate and increase your Search Engine rankings.

The Website Navigation You Should Use

To be effective, the website navigation system needs:

• To be consistent throughout the website. The website visitors will learn, through repetition, how to get around the website.
• The main navigation links kept together. This makes it easier for the visitor to get to the main areas of the website.
• Reduced clutter by grouping links into sections. If the list of website navigation links are grouped into sections and each section has only 5-7 links, this will make it easier to read the navigation scheme.
• Minimal clicking to get to where the visitor wants to get to. If the number of clicks to the web page the visitor wishes to visit is minimal, this leads to a better experience.Some visitors can become confused or impatient when clicking a bunch of links to get to where they want to be. In large websites, this can be difficult to reduce. Using breadcrumbs is one way to help the visitor see where they are within the website and the path back up the navigation path they took.

By spending some extra time creating the website navigation system at the planning stage of the website will effect the overall design of the web page layout and help develop the overall plan for the website. This is something we highly recommend to avoid website navigation mistakes.