Do links in the nav bar help SEO?
-
If I am building a Nav bar should I use my keywords or make it easier for the user to find what they are looking for. IMO one should ALWAYS make a site based on user experience.
If it Google and other SEs do count Nav links, would it be best to place more important keys first?
-
There's nothing wrong with doing this, as long as the "title" attribute is accurate (DON'T spam it with non-relevant keywords), but I haven't seem compelling evidence that it acts as a ranking signal.
-
One thing I'd keep in mind is that a lot of your main nav pages aren't always great landing pages for search users. "About Us" is a decent landing page for finding out about your company (and that or the home-page should rank fine), but it and "Contact Us" aren't usually good bets for your non-brand keywords. It's often better to have a dedicated page targeting separate services.
I think it's fine to use keywords for the "Services" page, or you could split that page into specific services. Then, each service would have a keyword-targeted internal link and content. In that sense, think of your services like products - you branch from a main "store" page to categories to individual products. Done well, it serves both users and SEO.
-
Ahh Genius! Thank you!!
-
-
Well thats the thing. From a user stand point its god to have an "ABOUT US" as a first link and a "CONTACT US" rather than "ABOUT US" being "MAIN KEYWORD" and "CONTACT US" Being "MAIN KEYWORD QUOTE"
On one hand users look for an about us page and a contact us on the Nav. However these terms are not helping with SEO.
According to Matt Cutts its better to target a user rather then a (Published on Apr 2, 2012) robot: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHYA5gAsRBA&feature=player_embedded
I wanted some SEOmoz opinion on the matter.
-
Hi Donnie
The best ways to optimise a navigation bar is with rich keywords but these keywords must still be relevant to the content that it is being linked to so when the user does click there are not clicking to a different page on your site or even a different website.
I hope this helped but if not then click on the link below about internal linking.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
If I nofollow outbound external links to minimize link juice loss > is it a good/bad thing?
OK, imagine you have a blog, and you want to make each blog post authoritative so you link out to authority relevant websites for reference. In this case it is two external links per blog post, one to an authority website for reference and one to flickr for photo credit. And one internal link to another part of the website like the buy-now page or a related internal blog post. Now tell me if this is a good or bad idea. What if you nofollow the external links and leave the internal link untouched so all internal links are dofollow. The thinking is this minimizes loss of link juice from external links and keeps it flowing through internal links to pages within the website. Would it be a good idea to lay off the nofollow tag and leave all as do follow? or would this be a good way to link out to authority sites but keep the link juice internal? Your thoughts are welcome. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rich_Coffman0 -
Should I remove all vendor links (link farm concerns)?
I have a web site that has been around for a long time. The industry we serve includes many, many small vendors and - back in the day - we decided to allow those vendors to submit their details, including a link to their own web site, for inclusion on our pages. These vendor listings were presented in location (state) pages as well as more granular pages within our industry (we called them "topics). I don't think it's important any more but 100% of the vendors listed were submitted by the vendors themselves, rather than us "hunting down" links for inclusion or automating this in any way. Some of the vendors (I'd guess maybe 10-15%) link back to us but many of these sites are mom-and-pop sites and would have extremely low authority. Today the list of vendors is in the thousands (US only). But the database is old and not maintained in any meaningful way. We have many broken links and I believe, rightly or wrongly, we are considered a link farm by the search engines. The pages on which these vendors are listed use dynamic URLs of the form: \vendors<state>-<topic>. The combination of states and topics means we have hundreds of these pages and they thus form a significant percentage of our pages. And they are garbage 🙂 So, not good.</topic></state> We understand that this model is broken. Our plan is to simply remove these pages (with the list of vendors) from our site. That's a simple fix but I want to be sure we're not doing anything wring here, from an SEO perspective. Is this as simple as that - just removing these page? How much effort should I put into redirecting (301) these removed URLs? For example, I could spend effort making sure that \vendors\California- <topic>(and for all states) goes to a general "topic" page (which still has relevance, but won't have any vendors listed)</topic> I know there is no distinct answer to this, but what expectation should I have about the impact of removing these pages? Would the removal of a large percentage of garbage pages (leaving much better content) be expected to be a major factor in SEO? Anyway, before I go down this path I thought I'd check here in case I miss something. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarkWill0 -
Are Navigation links different to static links
We are trying to reduce the number of links on our homepage. We could remove some fly out navigation links, We rank 1st on Google for some of these links. Would removing these hurt our SEO. The links are accessible 1 level down if we remove the homepage.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Archers0 -
Are seo press releases with links from PRWEB helpful ?
I am thinking of doing some press releases from PRWEB. they offer a press release with live links for better seo effect. Is this really effective ? Has any one seen this to be benficial ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jlane90 -
How does a competing website with clearly black hat style SEO tactics, have a far higher domain authority than our website that only uses legitimate link building tactics?
Through SEO Moz link analysis tools, we looked at a competing websites external followed links and discovered a large number of links going to Blog pages with domain authorities in the 90's (their blog page authorities were between 40 and 60), however the single blog post written by this website was exactly the same in every instance and had been posted in August 2011. Some of these blog sites had 160 or so links linking back to this competing website whose domain authority is 49 while ours is 28, their Moz Trust is 5.43 while ours is 5.18. An example of some of the blogs that link to the competing website are: http://advocacy.mit.edu/coulter/blog/?p=13 http://pest-control-termite-inspection.posterous.com/\ However many of these links are "no follow" and yet still show up on Open Site Explorer as some of this competing websites top linking pages. Admittedly, they have 584 linking root domains while we have only 35, but if most of them are the kind of websites posted above, we don't understand how Google is rewarding them with a higher domain authority. Our website is www.anteater.com.au Are these tactics now the only way to get ahead?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter.Huxley590 -
Thanks for the help!
I just wanted to say thank you all for the advice you've given on this board. When I first joined we had been stomped by Panda three times and our traffic was down about 40% from last year. Since then, we've followed recommendations here and while we aren't quite back to where we were before, our traffic for the last three days from Google is higher than any time since May and trending higher. We are also up in Google rank for 70% of our tracked keywords and showing up for 15% that we weren't even on the radar for in August. We still have a lot of work to do but know that we are on the right track. We can now do the same on a site that survived the initial hit but got slapped in July. I just want to reiterate what others have said: Get rid of duplicate urls - 301 redirect all dups to a single page Flesh out or drop pages with low content value Find 404 pages that used to exist and instead of 404s, 301 redirect to current resources Fix speed issues This forum was well worth the subscription.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IanTheScot1 -
Too many links!
Hi, I'm running a wordpress blog (modhop.com) and am getting the "too many links" on almost all of my pages. It appears that in addition to basic site navigation I have plug-ins that create invisible links that are counted in the crawl...at least that's my guess. Is there a good way to control this in wordpress? A nofollow in the .htaccess? A plug-in that does this? (I'm sort of at novice-plus level here so the simplest solution is ideal.) Thanks! Jake modhop.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | modhop0