Navigation 101 (reminders)
I have recently been converting (re-designing) one of my sites and was having a good conversation with my programmer about the Navigation of the site. Because of that conversation I thought it would be a good time to remind everyone about some of the basics when it comes to the navigation of your site.
Make sure your site has “breadcrumbs”. If you are not familiar with this term think back to the tale of Hansel and Grettle and them leaving breadcrumbs to find thier way back. The people visiting your site need to know where they have been and are going and be able to get back quickly (without getting lost along the way). Besides for user-friendliness you need to do this for the search engine crawlers, (breadcrumbs are good for SEO) so they can easily crawl your site and index the correct pages. Spiders (especially Googlebot) does not like “orphan pages” or pages that exist with no navigation or any links on them. The most common reason for this could be for spam-sense (spammy adsense sites) to trick people to only click on ads cause there is no navigation.
Making it easier to navigate will not confuse potential customers and could increase sales. More exposure on the search engines could turn into more traffic, which you know can turn into more sales and more money for you!
 If you want a great example of breadcrumbs on a site check out the site http://www.rockymountainmattress.com/shop/ (This is one of mine that sells the memory foam mattress.) Check out the top navigation and see how no pages are left “orphaned” as well as the breadcrumb navigation in the top left of the shopping cart.
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