How to improve the structure of URLs was the purpose of the first part of this section. Now, we continue to the second part through which we'll try to explain how to make your website easier to navigate.
Navigation is very important for search engines
One of the most important things in the process of SEO is to make the navigation of your website easier in order to help visitors quickly find the content they want. It can also help search engines know what content is important recording to the webmaster. Although Google's search results are provided at a page level, Google also likes to have a sense of what role a page plays in the bigger picture of the website.
Plan out your navigation based on your homepage
All websites have a home or "root" page (index.html, index.php ...etc.), which is usually the starting place of navigation for many visitors. If your website has a multiple of pages, you should think about how users will go from the home page (your root page) to a specific page containing more specific content. That it would make sense to create a page describing these related pages (e.g. Home page -> list of topics -> specific topic). For example if your website offers hundreds of different products that need to be displayed under multiple categories and subcategories.
Use the breadcrumb lists
A breadcrumb is a row of internal links at the top or bottom of the page that allows users to quickly move back to a previous section or the home page(see the example above). Many breadcrumbs have the home page as the first, left-most link and list the more specific sections out to the right.
Allow for the possibility of a part of the URL being removed
Some users might navigate your website in odd ways, and you should anticipate this. For example, instead of using the breadcrumb links on the page, a user might remove a part of the URL in order to find more general content. He or she might be visiting http://www.techno2brain.com/2014/01/the-benefits-of-creating-microsite.html, but then enter Topics published in January 2014 into the browser's address bar, thinking that this will show all topics published in January 2014. Your website must be prepared to show content in this situation or give the user a 404 page not found error (An HTTP status code. It means that the server could not find the web page requested by the browser).
Create two sitemaps: one for users, one for search engines
A sitemap (lower-case) is a simple webpage on your website that shows the structure of your website (general page, category pages and subcategory pages), and usually consists of a hierarchical listing of the pages on your website. Visitors may visit this page if they want to find quickly a specific page on your website. In addition, While search engines will also visit this page, getting good crawl coverage of the pages on your website, it's mainly aimed at human visitors.
An XML Sitemap (upper-case) file (A list of the pages on a particular website. By creating and sending this list, you are able to notify Google of all pages on a website, including any URLs that may have been undetected by Google's regular crawling process),which you can submit through Google's Webmaster Tools, facilitate the task for Google to discover the pages on your website. Using a Sitemap file is also one way to tell Google which version of a URL you'd prefer as the canonical one (e.g. http://techno2brain.com/ or http://www.techno2brain.com/; more on what's a preferred domain). Google helped create the open source Sitemap Generator Script to help you create a Sitemap file for your website. To learn more about Sitemaps, the Webmaster Help Center provides a useful guide to Sitemap files.
This is all for this section. See you next time with another section about offering quality content and services.
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