14 Tactics to Make Your Website Work Harder Right Now: Tactic 6 - Navigation Should, Uh, Help People Navigate Stuff

Effective navigation can help both rankings and clickthroughs. Your website’s primary navigation should clearly indicate what each section is about. And if you can’t sum it up in three words or less, that’s probably a good indication your pages need to be more topically focused. For example, if you offer three types of real estate services, place a “Real Estate Services” button in your primary navigation and then link to sub-pages for each of your services from the Services main page and/or various other locations within the site.

Some other fixes for your nav bar:

-> Most people’s short term memory can only retain about 7 or 8 items at a time. Keep this in mind when deciding how many primary navigation buttons you need.

-> Make the primary navigation stand out and put it in one of the two usual places: horizontally just beneath the page header or vertically down the left hand side (ensuring all the buttons are visible above the fold).

-> Resist the urge to dress up your navigation too much. It should be easy to read and probably in a font no smaller than 12 points. ->Include “Home” as the first nav button. People always “go home” when they’re lost.

-> A nice feature is if nav buttons display differently when they are active or have been clicked on. It saves redundant clicking (that short term memory thing again).

-> Use the same color and formatting for all primary navigation buttons. No rainbows please.

-> If your navigation buttons are images, create a text only version at the bottom of each page. This ensures the search engines are noticing what your pages are about and weighting that information accordingly.

DESIGN TIP: Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) make it possible to create professional looking navigation menus that are text-based, removing the need for a second set of text links in your page footers. ->Keeping in line with the above, use keyword rich navigation text where appropriate. But only do so if it sounds natural, not forced.

One more peeve about navigation bars that I think deserves special consideration: If you don’t want to publish your rates, then don’t have a nav button called “Rates”! A Rates button should take visitors to a page with rates. Period. Using a Rates button to seduce people into contacting you is not only foolish but it looks unprofessional. Same goes for your About page. If you are not going to tell visitors anything useful there, then skip it altogether.