What is navigation?


Your site’s navigation is an important part of providing a good user experience — it’s where you put the most important pages that you want people to be able to find. It gives structure and hierarchy to your website, which is important to Google, and having a good navigation will help you rank higher in search results.

So what are best practices for your site’s navigation? Don’t put everything in the main navigation — try to organize it in a hierarchical sense. Put your main pages in the navigation, and if necessary, include the subpages underneath the main pages. Common pages to include in the main navigation are the About, Contact and Blog pages.

For a while, it was common to include keywords in page names to improve SEO, but this isn’t best practice anymore. We suggest using basic, easy to understand names for your pages — it’s better value to save the keywords for the actual content on your page.

About Carrie

Carrie Rollwagen is host of the Localist podcast and cofounder of Church Street Coffee & Books. Currently, she works as Vice President of Strategic Planning at Infomedia, a web development company in Birmingham, Alabama. Find the Localist at @thinklocalist on Instagram and follow Carrie at @crollwagen.

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