Website Usability: Deep Link Navigation
Website Usability Through Deep Link Navigation
The Internet is changing. How people use the Internet has changed greatly in the last few years. How people search on the Internet is changing, and more importantly to anyone that has a website, Search Engines Are Changing!
That last statement is the most important 4 words I have written in a long time. Google, Yahoo, MSN (Windows Live, or whatever they are calling themselves today) and Ask have all made major modifications in the last 12 months. As an Internet marketer, it is my job to keep up on the search engines and how they affect my clients. Everyone in the industry knows that all the engines are putting a lot more focus on fresh content. News oriented sites are ranking higher than static sites.
Just about everyone I know in the industry is getting on the social network marketing bandwagon. While that is great for business, it leads to long term problems. I have been blogging for 4 years now and have some very successful sites. It wasn’t some great insight or a psychic vision that led me to blogging, it was security. I had been running some very important forums and portals. They were getting tons of traffic and placing very well. The problem was the amount of hacking going on with PHP NUKE and phpBB. I couldn’t keep up with all the security issues and also moderate all the forums.
It was at this point that I started using Blogger as a means to keep fresh content and give my clients’ users the info they needed. Now everyone and their mother is blogging. Get Found Now uses multiple blogs including Blogger and WordPress. While you will get conflicting information about using sub-domains or even a new domain just for the blog, I always try to get a blog going within the root of a site. I don’t like sandbox sites for a blog and I really hate subs (like most search engines).
The picture I am painting here is with social network marketing platforms included within an existing website, the size of the site is going to triple at least, within a month of releasing a blog. That being said there are several tactics that MUST be included in your overall website game-plan:
- XML Sitemaps – you must have an xml sitemap so the search engines can get a clear picture of your site. Sitemap.org is the recognized standard by Google, Yahoo, and MSN. While you also need a static sitemap for your visitors, don’t think for a second that will work for Google or Yahoo. I generally have multiple XML maps for each section of the sites content structure.
- Navigation Elements – I like drop down navigation with search-engine friendly code. Since I use Dreamweaver for dev stuff, my navigation system is PluginLab. I also firmly believe in static internal links within the footer. If you follow the standard site page mapping that has little or no outbound links on the home page except to a sitemap, then you need not worry about internal link structure since your site will not be found easily by the search engines period!
- Easy access to contact info – I always put address and phone numbers on every page.
When creating a guideline for future site growth make sure you have a solid content guide. Know where your content is going for at least a month in advance. Try to do serial articles and be consistent with your topics. Having a solid outline will make it easier to implement the usability plans I am laying out for the next month.
Website Support For Deep Link Users
A large site has many pages, most of which are also entry pages. I generally try to get entry statistics somewhere around 40%. That means that 60% of visitors enter at the home page, and the others enter somewhere deeper in the site. That is why it is key to have site controls on every page. By site controls I am talking about easy means to find the home page, quote forms, etc. General search functions or home page links and phone numbers won’t count as duplicate content penalties, but if you are really worried about it, put them in a graphic file.
Guidelines for Deep Link Usability:
- Keep it simple! Always have these elements on every page – Company name or logo in the upper left hand corner – Direct, one click link to the homepage – Site Search, the best spot for that is top on the top right hand side. Tell users where they are… at all times and have related content or pages easily visible. You don’t need to list all the pages on your site, just the pages that correlate to the subject matter the visitor is actually reading.
- Orient the user to the entire site! If your site has a flat directory structure or a hierarchy to the content architecture, leave a trail or links the user can follow. This is known in the industry as a “linking breadcrumb trail”, and is the best way to show the user where they are, and how they got there. Again do not flood the user with unrelated content.
- Don’t assume the user followed the same path you would! Sure you can drill down your site and find whatever you are looking for, but you built it! Users can and will take different paths to find the data they are looking for. Always have links to the higher level pages in a content group.
The moral of this story is to create a solid linking structure that lets the user know where they are at all times, how they got to where they are and clear paths to where they are likely to be going.
Excellent tips.This means you need to design a blog that is as easy as possible to navigate, personally I use Wordpress.My blog has a lot of information at this point so i placed an search box in the top right corner to make it as easy as possible to find what they are looking for.
There is another point to deep linking as well.I deep link to a relevant post when I write a new one and also deep link to a relevant post of mine when commenting on other blogs.