Navigation
One thing which always shows inexperienced
website design is lack of navigation. It is vital never to lead
your visitors to a dead end. There must always be at least a Home
link to link back to the entry page and the very minumum. Take
a look at this page, there are at least 15 ways to move away to
another section of the site. This is not only good for human visitors
but will allow the search engine robots freedom to move around
your site and give a better report to the search engine.
It is also a good idea to make your links descriptive. Rather than a text link "Page 1" try "Page 1 - Spangles and dangles" that way the robot will know more what it is heading to. Also avoid graphic buttons, Google will like your text links better as they tell the robot what the link is about.
Also do not confuse your visitor, make navigation obvious. I like to have my text links not underlined, but if I want to make sure people know it is a link I underline it.
Navigation
- Breadcrumbs
So there are many ways to navigate a site but one
of the best is breadcrumbs. This tells the user where they have
come from and how to get back there. Also it is a good idea to
put those breadcrumbs at the top and bottom of your body of information.
This is the breadcrumb for this page:
Webdesign
Tips Home > Page
3
Not a true breadcrumb really in that you could navigate on somewhere
else on my site and this would not follow your progress. But to
tell a visitor where they are it is very usefull. There are programs
which and generate true breadcrumbs, but I am happy with the no
quite ture version.
Links
The more sites that link to you, the better your site will be
which also means that you must link to other sites. The guidelines
say that a higher ranked site (google operates a page rank system
from 0 to 10 of how important a site is to google) is a better
place to link to you and you link back than a lower ranked one.
However on this I disagre, for new sites it is best to get as
much traffic as you can with one proviso, try to make sure it
is targeted traffic rather than junk traffic just using up your
sites bandwidth... in other words: having people come to your
site for Ford Fiestas (cars) when your site is about Fieatas is
Spain (parties) is not a lot of good. Try to make sure that your
traffic is coming from a party site rather than a car site!
Stats
It is a good idea to have statistics on key pages
of your site. One advantage with yahoo geocities is that you get
stats for every page. They cover the referering URL, where a visitor
came from to get to the page; search engine quiries, what someone
typed in order to find your site; page views; visitors computer
settings; and a bunch of handy things to know. This info is almost
esential to help you tailor your webpages and see pontential pitfalls
for the visitor.
I use a free tracker from eXTReMe Tracking, which after trying quite a few found the best. Click here to see stats for my car page, easily the most visited page on my site. Go get yourself a tracker for your pages: http://extreme-dm.com/tracking/ it takes the guesswork out of knowing where your visitors come from.