Among the most powerful features included in the WordPress platform are its tremendous capabilities where menus are concerned. For search engine optimization, menus are vital.
If your menus are dependent upon technologies that search engine crawlers do not support, then you can count your pages not being indexed as you’d like them to be. Where menus are concerned, cross browser friendliness is a necessity.
Technology
When you’re talking about search engine optimization, simplicity is always preferable to complexity. This is particularly true where menus are being discussed. Many different menu systems incorporate technologies such as JavaScript into their builds. Unfortunately, this is not good for search engine optimization. For properly optimized menus, you’ll want HTML and CSS only. The CSS elements will provide for features such as drop-down menus and other eye-catching features.
Among the oldest and most effective types of menus are breadcrumb menus. You’ll find these at the top of well-designed sites. On any page, the top – sometimes the bottom – of the page will have a path that links back to the original page you started at and that details all of the steps that brought you to the page you’re on. This has the effect of creating a trail of breadcrumbs, as it were, that allow you to backtrack your path through the site. These are important elements in proper navigation for an optimized site.
Suckerfish, UberMenu and other technologies are commonly used with WordPress themes. These provide standards compliant menus that can be easily altered by people who are not particularly adept from a technical standpoint.
Organization
WordPress has powerful content organizing features built right into it. For example, being able to tag your posts provides you with one of the most effective ways ever devised to create an easily navigable archive of information out of your blog. None of this works, however, without a sensible plan.
Drop-down menus are great resources for organizing complex sites. Remember, however, that the more items you add in any category the greater the chance that the drop-down menu is actually going to start becoming unwieldy and obscuring parts of your pages. Generally speaking, it’s better to add a new category that it is to end up with seven or eight pages within the same category. Think of your website like a library and organize everything in the way that makes it as easy as possible for people to find their way through the content.
If you’re using the WordPress platform alone, you can define a new menu from your WordPress dashboard. This is found under the appearance menu and then under the menus option. It’s easy to add new categories an entirely new menus using this feature, which is one of the reasons that WordPress is so popular is a content management system.
Themes
Premium themes for wordpress generally come with great navigation plug-ins loaded into them. In most cases, you can control these from the admin panel, which provides you with control over the entire site, navigation menus included. Make certain that any theme you purchase is described as being compliant with web authoring standards. This ensures that, among other things, your menus will be intelligible to search engine crawlers.
Take some time to come up with a sensible navigation structure for your site. The end result will be that your visitors have an easier experience navigating your site and the search engine crawlers are more likely to find their way to your content and to categorize it correctly. This is one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization.
If the search engine crawlers cannot make their way through your site, they cannot index your content and your search engine optimization efforts are for naught.
About Olga Ionel
Excellent advice, navigation is not only good for SEO but is vital for turning traffic in to customers.
Twitter: Taruhan Bola
says:
Hello…
I liked the theme seo friendly, many people say that the theme affects the power structure of the SEO. In your opinion, what percentage of the theme in the success rate of SEO?
Thanks before
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Quality of the WordPress Features are really commendable. The SEO tools provided in wordpress helps to boost up the blog or website’s search result. Thank you very much for such an informative post.
Twitter: themefuse
says:
Hello Karan,
I also think that when choosing a wordpress theme, one should take into consideration that it should be SEO optimized, like wordpress themes that ThemeFuse does.
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Interesting post Olga Ionel,
Along the vein of ‘visible’ content optimization, images are often forgotten in page optimization. Naming your images and their related ALT tags to coincide with the content theme can be beneficial and should not be overlooked.
Twitter: Ajayudayagiri
says:
Theme selection plays an important role in building a website. And coming to the SEO, it can be considered as the heart of the site and it must be done for sure.
Thanks for sharing
Ajay recently posted..Increase Organic Search Traffic From Google|Get Organic Traffic Instantly
Yes, the on page optimization is very important for the seo. And a small niche website with low competition can be optimized very well through on page.
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Really amazing thought by u hope u ll support forth coming…What’s the best search engine optimization company? And what exactly do they offer? It seems there’s huge amount SEO companies but not a lot that makes them different.Thnaks….
Twitter: bloggerspassion
says:
if you are good at coding and need a great seo optimized theme for WordPress blog, I would suggest thesis.
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I find breadcrumb navigation extremely useful. Especially when you’ve ended up deep into a site and you need to jump back a few steps. Navigation is important and is probably overlooked a lot of the time in terms of SEO.
Search engine optimization is important to our website so we must know the techniques that will increase the visibility of our website.
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Word press is a great CMS and the features it offers are unique and user friendly. Thanks for this interesting and unique share.
SEO is the process of optimizing a site on search engine to make it visible on search engine results. It is a slow and long time process consisting of two main aspects i.e, On Page SEO and Off Page SEO. Off Page SEO is also known as Link Building whereby a website is being submitted to various directories to get one way or reciprocal backlinks, the process goes into a hierarchy of steps which starts with Directory Submission in which site is submitted to various directories to get one way links, then the process moves to Keyword Submission where different keywords are submitted to the directories in order to get more powerful links, process continues with blog commenting and forum posting which is the most powerful way to build links.It is an ongoing process as long as the website exist .
Twitter: themefuse
says:
Swapnil, thank you for your details about the ways to make search engine optimization.
Olga Ionel recently posted..Did you know that inactive WordPress plugins and themes don’t make your site slower?
Twitter: sajithsand
says:
Nevertheless to say that the wordpress is the best. But irrespective of the platform it is required to optimize the blog for more traffic. I found Google has lot of Services which are very useful for the webmasters.
Nice article and thank your valuable information and I wish you luck
Twitter: antonrsa
says:
Hi Olga,
Yes – Theme selection plays a bog part of navigation and SEO when it comes to having your website hosted by WordPress. There are so many advantages that WordPress has – amongst many others the ability to edit and change the theme you’ve selected. This is important to take into consideration if you want a unique looking and search engine optimized website – like having breadcrumb menus and valuable social and bookmark plugins (amongst the many plugins available).
i am also a reader and visitor of different sites and blogs. I keep coming back to sites that has easy
navigation and that what makes wordpress stand up when it comes to this.
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My search engine ranking for my website used to be #3 and now it dropped and it’s on page 7 when I search for it using my keywords from my desktop computer. When I searched using my laptop it is in position 5 on the first page. Why is it different on my laptop from my destop? I
Twitter: themefuse
says:
Copic, I think Google has a lot of data centers all over the world and they have different algorithms that rate site’s position. So it depends where does the data come to your device. Because the data centers from different countries don’t have perfect synchronization, that’s why you see different results on your devices.
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Twitter: collegeocontent
says:
a well coded theme will naturally benefit your Seo, not just by structural navigation, but also how the site is coded.
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Easy navigation is essential for any blog and has a huge impact on the organic traffic. WordPress is great for the easy customization.
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Twitter: marketsecrets
says:
The cross-browser friendliness is indeed important and something many bloggers do not consider when choosing a different theme as I have made that mistake before snd ended up going through tons of editing :roll:
This is why if you study some of the newer themes css’s you’ll notice extra parameters for ie, etc
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Twitter: themefuse
says:
Yes,you should definitely take into consideration how your website goes on different browsers. I saw a lot of websites dealing with this problem. So, you should be carefully at the beginning of creating your site, in order to save your time with editing.
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Twitter: taxfile_india
says:
Interesting! Aside from indexing pages, how else can a good menu / navigation system help in SEO? Im going to read more on HTML and CSS menus.
Great post. wordpress is best. I loved lots of things . Your post is extremely helpful. keep sharing these type of posts with us.
Twitter: themefuse
says:
Kelly, I also think that wordpress is the best and easier CMS to use.
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Twitter: hottjam
says:
Love it! The design and your content (so far) is great. Will be back for sure.
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Twitter: themefuse
says:
I am pleased to find out that you like the post.
Olga Ionel recently posted..How to Create a Membership Site on WordPress
I think wordpress is one of the best CMS available today. Loaded with rich features and ease of use its a delight both for the website developer as well as website owner.
This, for me, was one of those rare posts that offers something completely new. I clearly haven’t given this aspect as much consideration as I should have done. I don’t think my navigation is particularly poor but I now have a clearer sense of how it can be improved. I will look at enabling breadcrumbs to start with.
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Great. post. thanks for helping everyone by sharing such a knowledgeable post with us. keep on sharing these type of posts with us. Business Broker South Florida Ft. Lauderdale
Twitter: themefuse
says:
Ronny, thank you for your appreciation. I’m glad you like the post.
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