Internal And External Blog Navigation

When you consider blog navigation, there are two types: internal navigation and external navigation. Internal navigation involves the links that move users from one page to another on your blog. External navigation refers to links that take users away from your page. For your navigation to be SEO-friendly, you have to use both types of navigation carefully.

Look at a number of different high-ranking Blogs. How is the navigation of those blogs designed? In most cases, you will find that the top blogs have a left-hand navigation bar that’s often text-based, and some have a button-based navigation bar across the top of the page. Few have just buttons down the left side, and all of them have text links somewhere in the landing page.

The navigation for many blogs looks the same, because this plan works. Having a text-based navigation bar on the left works for SEO because it allows you to use anchor tags with the keywords you are using for the blog. It also allows crawlers to move from one page to another with ease.

Buttons are harder for crawlers to navigate, and depending on the code in which those buttons are designed, they might be completely invisible to the crawler. That is why many companies that put button-based links at the top of the page also usually include a text-based navigation bar on the left.

The other element you see on nearly every page is text-based links within the content of the page. Again, those links are usually created with anchor tags that include the keywords the site is using to build blog ranking. This is an effective way to gain site ranking. The crawler comes into the blog, examines the linking system, examines the content of the page, compares these items, and finds that the links are relevant to the content, which is relevant to the keywords. That is how your ranking is determined. Every element works together.

Take the time to design a navigational structure that’s not only comfortable for your users, but is also crawler-friendly. If it can’t always be perfect for the crawlers, make sure it’s perfect for users. Again, SEO is influenced by many different things, but return visits from users are the ultimate goal. This
may mean that you have to test your blog structure and navigation with a user group and change it a few times before you find a method that works both for returning users and for the crawlers that help to bring you new users. Do those tests. That’s the only way you will learn what works.

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