Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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
-
Help article / Knowledge base SEO consideration
Hi everyone, I am in the process of building the knowledge base for our SaaS product and I am afraid it could impact us negatively on the SEO side because of: Thin content on pages containing short answers to specific questions Keyword cannibalisation between some of our blog articles and the knowledge base articles I didn't find much on the impact of knowledge bases on SEO when I searched on Google. So I'm hoping we can use this thread to share a few thoughts and best practices on this topic. Below is a bit more details on the issues I face, any tips on how to address them would be most welcome. 1. Thin content: Some articles will have thin content by design: the H1 will be a specific question and there will be only 2 or 3 lines of text answering it in the article. I think creating a dedicated article per question is better than grouping 20 questions on one article from a UX point of view, because this will enable us to direct users more quickly to the answer when they use the live search function inside the software (help widget) or on the knowledge base (saves them the need to scrolling a long article to find the answer). Now the issue is that this will result in lots of pages with thin content. A workaround could be to have both a detailed FAQ style page with all the questions and answers, and individual articles for each question on top of that. The FAQ style page could be indexed in Google while the individual articles would have either a noIndex directive or a rel canonical to the FAQ style page. Have any of you faced similar issues when setting-up your knowledge base? Which approach would you recommend? 2.Keyword cannibalisation: There will be, to some extend, a level of keyword cannibalisation between our blog articles (which rank well) and some of the knowledge base articles. While we want both types of articles to appear in search, we don't want the "How to do XYZ" blog article containing practical tips to compete with the "How to do XYZ in the software" knowledge base article. Do you have any advice on how to achieve that? Having a specific Schema.org (or equivalent) type of markup to differentiate between the 2 types of articles would have been ideal but I couldn't find anything relating to help articles specifically when I searched.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tbps0 -
Onsite SEO vs Offsite SEO
Hey I know the importance of both onsite & offsite, primarily with regard to outreach/content/social. One thing I am trying to determine at the moment, is how much do I invest in offsite. My current focus is to improve our onpage content on product pages, which is taking some time as we have a small team. But I also know our backlinks need to improve. I'm just struggling on where to spend my time. Finish the onsite stuff by section first, or try to do a bit of both onsite/offsite at the same time?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
SEO time
I wanto to be in the top of the google search. I am usiing a lot of SEO tools but... I have done it during one month. Do I have to wait more?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CarlosZambrana0 -
H3 Tags - Should I Link to my content Articles- ? And do I have to many H3 tags/ Links as it is ?
Hello All, On my ecommerce landing pages, I currently have links to my products as H3 Tags. I also have useful guides displayed on the page with links useful articles we have written (they currently go to my news section). I am wondering if I should put those article links as additional H3 tags as well for added seo benefit or do I have to many tags as it is ?. A link to my Landing Page I am talking about is - http://goo.gl/h838RW Screenshot of my h1-h6 tags - http://imgur.com/hLtX0n7 I enclose screenshot my guides and also of my H1-H6 tags. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. thanks Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Help FORUM ( User generated content ) SEO best practices
Hello Moz folks ! For the very first time im dealing with a massive community who rely on UGC ( user generated content ). Their forum is finding a great deal of duplicate content/broken link/ duplicate title and on-site issue. I have Advance SEO knowledge related to ecommerce or blogging but new to forum and UGC. I would really love to learn or get ressources links that would allow me to see/understand the best practices in term of SEO. Any help is greatly appreciated. Best, Yan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ydesjardins2000 -
Majestic SEO Versus MOZ for Link Tracking
I have subscribed to Majestic SEO for three years and am considering cancelling it as it cost $600/year. Is this a false economy? Will I be losing essential data? Also, MOZ seems really deficient in the link tracking department. Its data seems plain wrong, showing far fewer domains pointing at my site than either Google Webmaster Tools or Majestic SEO. If I get rid of Majestic SEO are there any free/low cost tools that could take it's place? Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Dummy links in posts
Hi, Dummy links in posts. We use 100's of sample/example lnks as below http://<domain name></domain name> http://localhost http://192.168.1.1 http:/some site name as example which is not available/sample.html many more is there any tag we can use to show its a sample and not a link and while we scan pages to find broken links they are skipped and not reported as 404 etc? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Outbound link to PDF vs outbound link to page
If you're trying to create a site which is an information hub, obviously linking out to authoritative sites is a good idea. However, does linking to a PDF have the same effect? e.g Linking to Google's SEO starter guide PDF, as opposed to linking to a google article on SEO. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | underscorelive0