Posts Tagged ‘navigation’

There are advantages and disadvantages to using both absolute and relative links. Here I will explore the differences between the two, outline some pros and cons and also provide some additional information on how you can create hyperlinks in your site that will ensure that all links to your content remain in tact and properly functioning.

Back in the day, you know… the early 2000′s I loved to use relative links. Inserting relative links made websites development easy in cutting-edge programs such as Microsoft FrontPage. By using relative links you could move files around in your directory structure and FrontPage would automatically update all your link paths throughout the site, keeping them connected to the pages in their new location. No more manually updating all your internal links by hand! It was brilliant.

But now I’m not so big of a fan as relative links as I once was. I don’t have huge problems with them, but I understand the value in using absolute links rather than relative links. But perhaps I should take a step back and explain the difference between the two.

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When a website goes into development most of the attention is usually paid to the design elements. That’s obviously the most important thing, right? The images, the layout, the colors, the navigation, how the user will interact with the site? These are all important elements to consider and necessary for developing a site that provides the best usability experience for your visitors. But what often doesn’t get enough attention is the site’s directory structure.

When I talk of a site’s directory structure I refer to both the file directory and internal link structures. They are two very different things, but in reality they should often mirror each other very closely, but not always…

Yesterday we rolled out a a brand new design for EMP. Aside from the design improvements (the first in three years) we added a lot of customization that will benefit us and hopefully make for a better usability experience for all of you. We’re still tinkering with some things, fixing broken links, etc. so be patient.

One of the biggest changes we’ve made is moving (EMP) E-Marketing Performance back to our company domain. As of now, www.eMarketingPerformance.com redirects to www.PolePositionMarketing.com/emp, it’s new permanent home. All the redirects are in place but if you’ve linked to this blog recently and you would like to go back and change the URL of the link, that would be greatly appreciated!

We’ve removed all the Google ads and fully integrated the PPM navigation bar into the blog for easy access back to the money site! Of course, now we just got to start posting some fresh content. Oh, and the sight is lightning fast.

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• Feel Great Naked: Confidence Boosters for Getting Personal
• Do You Know Your Visitors? 5 Points to Consider
• Content Strategy: Key Elements To Grab Online Readers Attention
• Site Navigation and Usability: Easy Tips for Happy Users
• Tips on Content Centered Link Building
• 5 Recommended Ways to Build Your Opt-In List
• Are Internal Links Weighted the Same as External Links by Google?

There is no better way to create an infinite amount of duplicate content on your site than to force session IDs onto each visitor. Typically, session IDs are used for tracking a single visitor’s navigation path through the site, including the adding or removing products from the shopping cart. They are great for tracking purposes, but really, really bad for search engines and inbound linking.

Ok, first of all, that’s a bad URL shown above, but aside from that, tacked on at the end there is the session ID. Both URLs pull the same page pulled open via a different browsing session. The bad stuff happens if the session IDs also get attached when the search engines come for a visit.

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Search engine spiders can be very forgiving with a lot of duplicate content issues. I’ve found that, given enough time, the engines learn when two websites or web pages are complete duplicates of the other. Once they figure that out then they basically understand that a link to one is a link to the other, etc. One version will ultimately be dropped from the index in favor of the other.

There are two basic problems with this. First, it all takes time. Until the search engines figure out which dupes should be “merged” you’re essentially splitting link flow. Two inbound links, one to each version, produce only have the power than two links both pointing to a single version.

The second problem is that you leave it to the search engines to decide which pages or site should be dropped from the index. When you let the search engines decide, you lose essential control.

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Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of sites where the designers were a bit lazy on the coding of the visual elements. Especially when it comes to creating new styles for the style sheet. In CSS, it’s pretty easy to develop a style that allows you to have certain portions of text display exactly how you want. But apparently, coming up with a unique style and name is just. too. difficult. So instead of naming a new style, the developers just style an Hx tag and then plaster it throughout the site.

One site that we’ve been working with has just come from a fresh re-design. Once we started digging into the code, we’ve found that the designers have taken some pretty extreme liberties with the Hx tags.

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Like a sound site architecture and directory structure, product categorization can play a significant role in how both search engines and users are able to access your products. There are two important things to consider when determining how to categorize your products. 1) Is each product assigned to the most appropriate category or categories? and 2) is multiple categorization creating duplicate content? The first issue frustrates your users and the second the search engines.

Looking for examples of both of these I found exactly what I was looking for on The Home Depot website. Click here to keep learning

There are two kinds of duplicate content: content that is duplicated on multiple websites sites and content that is duplicated on multiple pages of a single site. I believe the search engines treat each differently and, of course, there may be different standards applied duplicate content within each of these two main differentiations, depending on the cause and instance.

Please note that I’ve not done any in-depth testing of this issue so everything I’m presenting here are my own theories. But I think as far as untested theories go, it’s pretty solid.

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SEO

• Makeshift Anchor Text… Link Title Attribute vs Image Alt Tags: Which is Better?
• Rewriting URLs: SEO for CMS, E-Commerce, and Dynamic Sites
• Create Forms in Google Docs Spreadsheet
• Optimizing site structures through diverse navigation

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