Menu-based Navigation for SEO
Navigation links from menu structures in your website are probably going to be used on every page in your site.
This is important because it allows your users to find what they are looking for, right?
Well, what’s good for your user is also good for SEO purposes. This is because if all pages on your site can be accessed from a single menu, and that menu appears on every single page, then no matter what page they enter the website on, the search engine’s crawler bots can access and crawl every page – with one proviso, that you have the pages set to allow bots (also known as ‘spiders’, ‘robots’ or ‘crawlers’).
Sounds a little creepy, but for the arachnophobe there’s nothing to fear. These are the automated browsers from search engines like Google (and many others) that surf the web looking for new pages and content.
They are not creepy at all.
The more links that they can follow to your page, the sooner your content will gain its rank position in their indexes.
Note that linking within your website is different to building links from elsewhere to your website. I’ll cover that in the Step 8.
To optimise a menu structure, you should ideally represent every page in the menu if you can, but sometimes this makes the menu overwhelmingly complex and ends up creating a negative effect on UI/UX and also SEO.
For example, if you have an eCommerce store with 30 different product lines and several subcategories within those, your ‘Products’ or ‘Shop’ menu item will be 30+ lines deep to show all of your categories, which may cause the bottom items in the list to extend below the bottom of the user’s screen when the menu drops open.
Search engines can still enter, and maybe your user can too, but both will see this as a slightly negative result, and sometimes the categories at the bottom of the list miss out on clicks. In such cases, it’s best to split your menu into easy-to-view sections. Maybe by placing subcategory menu items only into pages that are dedicated to the parent category, or by lifting the categories into the primary menu and bypassing the first ‘Products’ or ‘Shop’ parent link.
If you’re unsure about how to best structure your menu, consider hiring SEO services for a consultation and some great tips on how to build the ideal for both UI/UX and SEO.