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orion_joel
02-15-2009, 01:34 AM
Hi All,

This is probably something that has been talked about a lot just about anywhere, but i thought could be a good topic.

When you are building a website for a business that sells a product how important is the navigation compared to the keywords for the search engine.

At this point i am building my business site with Wordpress and for the product data i am creating a new post and then linking it through a products page, and a product detail page. The page itself is a post with the product name making up the post name in the url, and the page name that displays in the top bar, also the site does submit sitemaps to google.

So really the question is it more important to create easy to follow on site navigation for users or try and get that page showing in google? From past experience the latter was true to some extent however now has this changed?

vangogh
02-15-2009, 02:05 AM
Navigation is always important on a website for both people and search spiders. There's no reason why you have to sacrifice one for the other. You'd like search engines to find your product pages so they can rank and pull search traffic. You also want people landing on a different page of your site to find your individual product pages.

For search engines you simply need to allow them to find the pages. As long as you have links pointing to the pages they should find those pages in time. The less clicks it takes to get to those pages the more likely they'll be found and the sooner they can be indexed. If you create a sitemap that you link to from every page of your site then every page of your site is no more than 2 clicks away from any other page. Easy for search engines to find.

Then create a navigation system for real people (search engines will still follow those links as well) and you'll have navigation for both.

There really isn't any reason you have to sacrifice real people or search spiders when building your site. In fact you'll more often than not find that making something easier for one also makes it easier for the other. Usability works well for people and search spiders.

orion_joel
02-15-2009, 04:56 AM
The thing that i am finding the problem, is i am not really sacrificing the navigation for the user for the search engine. The navigation i am setting up in what i find to be the most logical method to direct visitors to the page they will want. But in doing so it extends the path to about 3 clicks. Because of the number of different products that i offer, in a varied range. I am trying to move one of the categories to it's own dedicated site but that is a longer process that will take time.

billbenson
02-15-2009, 09:23 AM
I do a couple of things. Say the product is an HP E47 printer. I use that for the title and h1 on the catalog sell page. In htaccess redirect hpe47 printer to the dynamic url. Anytime you use a link to that page on your informational pages, link to hpe47 printer, not the dynamic url. If you have time, do that for all the pages and use the product name url not the dynamic url in the site map. Bit of a pain with a lot of products though. I have done this on a product by product basis for adwords and it works well. It would be nice if you could do it with the internal navigation, but I doubt any ecommerce packages will allow for that. Might be able to go into phpmyadmin and change the link from the site nav to hpe47Printer? If you have a dynamic link in the site nav and also have a link to hpe47printer I don't know if it creates dup content issues. I haven't noticed any.

The other thing I do is try to steer the customer to the site search. The site search works quite well with partial product names etc. I don't use the G search as I think that looks tacky, although I suppose that might make the more searched pages rank better in G, dunno? The search function always works better than the natural site nav.

vangogh
02-15-2009, 11:52 AM
Joel I'm not really sure what the problem is. Do you think 3 clicks is too much for people or search engines? If search engines then create an html sitemap like I described above. Then everything is at most 2 clicks away. If the 3 clicks is too much for people then you need to rethink your navigation.

What I like to do is create a top level navigation that links to every main category page and then within each category have a secondary navigation pointing to each of the pages in that section. So you might have a 'Products' link in your main navigation and then within all the product pages have links to the other products.

Another way to do it would be to have your categories be based on keyword themes. I'm assuming the site in question is Orion Networks. You could then have main categories for Computers, Printers, Networking, Software, Accessories. That way the URLs, page titles, etc for each section are based around keyword themes. The previous isn't the only way to organize things. It's just the first thing that came to my mind. You'll still end up with a few oddball pages that don't quite seem to fit into the navigational structure. If you think they'll be good selling pages then you can find other ways to link more directly to them.

There are a lot of ways to structure your content and organize it so it works for people and search engines.