Talking about website navigation, the experts say that having a strong structure and organized labels can greatly help in increasing the traffic and conversion results. Business owners today understand this and thus, hire the best website designers in India to avail premium website navigation designs in around seventy percent lesser costs as compared to the expenditure expected to be incurred on an in-house team of designers. These proficient website designers are adept at the best practices and tips for website navigation, some of which are:
1. Descriptive Labels
Labels like ‘what we do’, ‘products’, ‘services’ and ‘solutions’ don’t comprise of the keywords or key phrases, which actually hampers your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and conversion rates. To avert this, using descriptive or informative labels is one of the best practices and tips for website navigation. You can use Google Keyword Tool to pull out the best suitable key phrases to instantly appeal to the visitors browsing online for the products or services you are selling.
Secondly, refrain from listing all the services you offer on a single page as this brings down the probability of that page to rank higher (because it doesn’t focus on one particular topic). Understand that paying attention to your website’s architecture and navigation, both, is very important. So, if you want to put forward a search-optimized website, do not forget to make a separate page for different attributes like products, services and team members.
2. Bye-Bye Dropdown Menus
Although a very popular website format option, dropdown menus are not a good idea according to some of the best website designers in India. Not only the search engines find it difficult to crawl dropdown menus, the visitors also find them annoying most of the times. Visitors may also skip important pages and this problem can be clearly seen in your analytics if you are using dropdowns.
But yes, if you offer a wide range of products or services, your website can get bulky due to the presence of too many pages. To ensure this doesn’t increase your website’s loading time and visitors’ agitation, you can simply use a mega menu. According to the experts, this is the only type of dropdown menu that ranks high in usability; it can intensely increase the number of links from your website’s home page though.
3. Minimum Menu Items
Having hundreds of links on your website’s home page is certainly not going to serve you right. If you go by the top website navigation basics listed by the industry experts, the number of menu items should not exceed the count of seven. Considering the authority of your website’s homepage (as it’s linked to more sites than your interior pages), this tactic is even more important for SEO. Your homepage’s authority is directly related to the authority of the interior pages and with a more concise navigation, their ranking will also improve.
More items in your navigation also means that the visitors will have a hard time remembering and processing the available information. Thus, even if you exceed the ‘7 item rule’, try avoiding long lists and break them up into smaller groups. You can even keep the menu items lesser than seven to see better results faster.
4. Hierarchical Navigation
After the number of the menu items, the importance of their right order also cannot be missed. You must pay more attention to the top and bottom sections of the list as they usually account for the highest attention and retention. All you need to do is recognize the most important items via analytics and put them at the beginning of the navigation list. When these top-of-the-charts items are listed in the most visually prominent locations, your web design and content marketing automatically comes in handy.
5. Optimization for Mobile Devices
As smart phones have changed the entire face of online browsing, best practices and standards need to be adopted for the most effective mobile navigation. Small steps like your contact number turning into a button as soon as a visitor taps on it, can take you a long way in enhancing the overall user experience.
For such creative and inspirational ideas to improve your website navigation, without burning a hole in your pocket, you can consider the top outsourcing services providers in India. Let the experts handle your navigation and optimize it well for both search engine robots and human visitors.
John Tie is working as a Digital Marketer and content strategist with Virtual Employee, virtual staffing company, offering affordable and scalable remote staffing solutions for mainly Small and Medium Businesses (SMEs) around the world in over 150 domains. He is a versatile tech writer and loves exploring latest technology trends, entrepreneur and startup column.