It has been a while since I posted here and a few links have been building up in the wings. A number of them are articles I have read from various sites on online marketing. I thought it would be a good time to publish a post with these links with a few comments around them.
This week the Official Google Webmaster Blog had a series of posts on links. If you haven’t subscribed to their blog feed yet, you are missing some great tutorial articles that are valuable for all knowledge levels. One article each day provided an overview of three different link types and their role in Google’s (and all search engines) indexing and search results.
The key takeaway on internal links is twofold: maintain a shallow link hierarchy so pages can be reached with as few of clicks as possible and use descriptive anchor text. In addition to to a link architecture that allows pages to be accessed quickly, you also need to make sure your internal links are visible to search engines. Some sites use javascript or flash for navigation menus which sometimes make the navigation links invisible to search engines (and unaccessible to some visitors). I recommend small site owners avoid these methods and use CSS hover methods to hide and display menu sections.
External links are often overlooked by site owners. They focus on their internal link structure and incoming links instead. External links are important as proof of a human behind a site. Humans link to related content which provide background, commentary or opinions on topics they are discussing. Visitors give more credibility and are more likely to follow sites which have links to back up their opinions or provide background information. Linking to others in an non-obligation way also encourages others to link to content on your site they enjoy, providing great incoming links.
The article on inbound links is worthy of a read. A quick explanation of how inbound links affects ranking is followed by tips on getting inbound links. The most important thing to remember is you will likely need to cultivate relationships to attract links. This means writing quality content, being passionate about your site and making your site known in your niche market. Sometimes this means creating the online industry for your niche as the members of it are not web-savy. This may mean encouraging members of a community or industry to start their own websites, blog and subscribe to feeds. Once a small group of people start organizing an online community this way, starting conversations and linking to each other the community will be more discoverable and more likely to grow.
A few links from the past couple weeks.
Often web site owners design their site based on what they think or want their visitors to do. Navigation and organization conform to the existing web experience they have had on the Internet, no matter how frustrating or annoying they find the standard web experience. Instead of copying a broken model, try to break out of the pack and improve the experience on your website by thinking like your visitors.
In an article entitled “The Page Paradigm“, author Mark Hurst explains his Page Paradigm theorem. Short and concise, it states a visitor’s behaviour on every page on your site.
On any given Web page, users will either click something that appears to take them closer to the fulfilment of their goal, or click the Back button on their Web browser.
When considered, it makes perfect sense. Examining your own behaviour will reveal this paradigm in action. Not only does this help when planning your site, but it enforces the idea to think like your site’s target visitor.
If a visitor will either click on something that takes them closer to their goal or click the Back button (or close your site altogether) then you must understand what goals your visitor will come to your site with. Goals may be to seek information (read a blog post, or find information related to a search query, such as who was in The Graduate), to see details of a product or service, to find pricing on a product or service, to purchase a product or service or a multitude of others depending on the site.
Your job in designing the site is to make the information they are seeking easy to find. Ideally, arrivals from search engines should arrive on a page that has the information sought. Arrivals to your home page should be able to find the section or page of the site that has the information easily by the link descriptions and with the fewest clicks possible.
Part of making information easy to find is the site navigation and organization of information. I like to avoid using drop down or fly-out menus for navigation, but many clients believe it is the most effective way to link to all of their content and have a nice, professional design. Looking at it from a visitor’s perspective, it becomes an obstacle to their navigation, as they must learn the site’s User Interface upon their first visit when there is no indicator that there are hidden links available. Once discovered, they must then hover over each menu item to be able to view the sub-menu items to search for what they are looking for. Even though they may be familiar with the navigation design, this requires additional steps for them to find the information they are looking for.
One issue with some drop-down menu systems is that they employ JavaScript to insert the menus on the fly. While this works fine for visitors who have JavaScript enabled browsers, which is a vast majority, a major problem is this content is hidden from search engines. Search engines crawlers do not understand JavaScript, so any menu links are lost from the search engine index and rankings. For this reason, I strongly discourage these types of drop-down menu systems. Although there are standards based methods to accomplish hover menus that have fewer accessibility problems than other solutions, they still hinder the availability of information to most of the site visitors.
While not everyone will avoid hidden menus in their design, you can think about other ways to organize your information. One method can be to list links to primary content on the site’s navigation system and dedicate specific pages with information and links to secondary topics. This can provide an additional landing page for search engines for queries dealing with the primary topic. They key will be well-written and relevant content for those pages. Another key can be to avoid creating deep hierarchies of information and menus so information can be reached with the fewest of clicks.
Breaking away from web paradigms that restrict and frustrate users is a good thing. Keep your visitors in mind while designing your site and you will make the experience better for them, which will keep them coming back.
