Site Menu and keywords

Website menu design with keywords

[wmhelp]

Lots of websites have site menu at the top or on the side. But most of the menu items are usually very generic with text like:

Home ¦ Products ¦ Services/Articles ¦ Support ¦ About

However, I have seen a few websites with very specific or even narrow menu designs like:

Widgets ¦ Blue Widgets ¦ Red Widgets ¦ Green Widgets ¦ Other Keywords...

1. How affective is it for search engine results... assuming that the keywords are sufficiently backed by enough content in the site sections with seo-friendly urls (/widgets/blue-widgets/blue-widget-content1, so on and so forth).[/li]

2. How affective is it for reducing rejection rate for human visitors? (stickiness)

3. If this is indeed so affective, why is it that lots of sites, even ones that are apparently well designed for seo visibility, do not have such site wide navigation
   

Anyone tested the different approaches and found any difference?

[JohnRoy]

I can say it's most effective.
The only thing I can't answer is question# 3. It depends on the site, how large it is, and how many categories it has.

[vicky]

It all depends on the breadth of your website. Suppose, you are giving services A,B, and C then it is better to develop 3 different sections for them provided you have enough content. If not, then put them in the services section. You should always try to develop theme of the website

[Robert Charlton]

But most of the menu items are usually very generic...

Most menus aren't designed with much forethought re SEO or PageRank distribution. The "generic" menu design is typical of this. It may or may not suffice for usability.

You might want to take a look at this thread for a thoughtful approach to the latter...

Information Architecture for the Small Site - part 1
[webmasterworld.com...]

Re repetition of keywords in anchor text...

Widgets ¦ Blue Widgets ¦ Red Widgets ¦ Green Widgets ¦ Other Keywords...

Too frequent keyword repetition has been implicated in the Google "-950" or "end of results" penalty... for some sites, not all.

For more about the -950, take a look at this thread, which is noted in the Hot Topics [webmasterworld.com] section, pinned to the top of the Google Search forum home page...

Google -30 & 950 Penalties - brief summaries
[webmasterworld.com...]

I raised the question about repetition in nav links back in 2002, and you might say that the question is still unresolved, but consensus leans toward avoiding it....

Avoiding excessive repetition in global text links
"Widget" really belongs in every link, but it may be seen as spam
[webmasterworld.com...]

[wmhelp]

@JohnRoy: I can say it's most effective.
The only thing I can't answer is question# 3. It depends on the site, how large it is, and how many categories it has.

Thanks for the reply. I didn't keep track of the thread after a few days and missed the responses.

Did you see a large increase in traffic? How effective was it in terms of search results, PR, and stickiness?

[bbriniotis]

My suggestion is not to bury the important pages into categories. Lets say that you have a hotel site and the most important pages of the site are:

Home, Services, Rooms, Suites, Special offers

A very common mistake is to use a menu like that

Home, Services, Accommodation, About us, History, Contact
inside the accommodation there are the Room page and the Suite page and in each page you can find the special offers

Now this is a mistake because by using that kind of internal linking you indicate that the pages Aboutus, history and Contact are just important as home and services. On the other hand rooms, suites and special services can not easily be accessed by user or search engine. In this way less pagerank juice is passed.

I suggest using a menu like that:

Home, Services, Rooms, Suites, Special Offers, The Hotel, contact

The category 'the hotel' has links for about us and history. I also suggest to block the links 'The hotel' and contact by using Javascript. In this way you avoid passing link juice to those pages.

[Robert Charlton]

I also suggest to block the links 'The hotel' and contact by using Javascript. In this way you avoid passing link juice to those pages.

Not so anymore. This thread, which discusses the effects of rel="nofollow" for PR, suggests that Google is most likely also counting javascript links as well as nofollowed links when it divides PR....

Google Changes Treatment of PR 'Saved' by rel=nofollow Sculpting
[webmasterworld.com...]

So, though it's possible that no PR is passed through javascript links, it's not clear that PR is saved by using these links.

I agree with the rest of your comments regarding keeping important category links exposed... up to a point. At a certain point, if you get enough categories, you should start to use a hierarchical structure... keeping enough links from home, though, to services or products for sale that you don't get PR distracted too much by your obligatory links. Or, you might want to use iframes for the links you don't want counted.