Article by LinksManager.com Staff - © 2011, Reproduction without permission prohibited.

Some wise person, maybe Ann Landers or her sister "Dear Abby," once said "Make somebody happy today. Mind your own business."

Truth is, spending an occasional day minding your own business - as in making "home improvements" to your sales room - is also a way to make yourself feel better and, not coincidently, increase your sales and income.

In ecommerce, your website is your sales room and the ease with which customers, search engines and potential link partners can find what they want in it plays a critical role in how successful that site will be. A customer can't buy a product that isn't accessibly displayed. Google won't give you points for brilliant content or first-class authority links if it has to struggle to locate and tabulate them. Webmasters with gold-standard sites don't trade links with poorly structured ones.

We're talking, of course, about what's commonly called site navigation, but more accurately defined as internal linking. And we're talking about it because a well-executed internal linking strategy is as essential to success as a robust external linking strategy.

OK, since you're attending the LinksManager Linking School, let's start with a surprise quiz. A simple word- association test. What's the first thought about your site that pops into your head after reading the following quote from Google's official Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide?

Make your site easier to navigate. The navigation of a website is important in helping visitors quickly find the content they want. It can also help search engines understand what content the webmaster thinks is important."

If that first thought is "Navigation Bar," the chances are excellent that you'll get some benefit from the following five tips.

1. Don't rely on your Navbar to route 100 percent of the human and SE-bot traffic that flows in and out and through all the pages and elements on your site.

The idea of site navigation, to use Google's words again, is to "make it as easy as possible for users to go from general content to the more specific content they want on your site." Sometimes navigation bar buttons provide that "easy as possible transition," other times they don't.

Here's an example that's all too typical of many corporate and professional sites. An "About Us" Navbar button with eight or ten sub-links under it - everything from "History" to "Office Locations" to "Our Mission" to "How We Work" to "Who We Are."

2. Use Breadcrumb Links In Addition To Navbars

Let's face it, most of us want our Navbars to look pretty and high-techie. We don't, usually, demand that they actually sing and dance, but we do expect them to shuffle, jig or swirl their colors around when rolled over or clicked.

Which creates a problem that Google sums up in these words: Not all search engines can discover links on a site (with) navigation based entirely on drop-down menus, images or animations.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Many prospective customers may not be able to see or follow such links either because their browsers don't support the latest versions of Java or Flash and they're loath to download updates for fear of getting a virus.

Also, too, the vast majority of the millions and millions of people now using portable devices to browse the net can't access Flash-based Navbars and the Apple/Adobe feud may eventually make such Navbars unusable on iPads.

But wait, the news gets worse. Windows 7 64 ships with both 64-bit and 32-bit versions of Internet Explorer. Users opting to go with the fast 64-bit version also are barred from viewing Flash content. As are early adopters running the recently released test builds of Firefox 64.

Does that mean you should scrap your glitzy Navbar? Not at all, most net surfers will have no trouble with it. It does mean, however, that you should add a simple text-link navigation section -usually know as breadcrumb links -- to at least your home page.

Here's the animated top of the page Navbar on Netflix.com:

And here are the breadcrumb links near the bottom of the page:

The "breadcrumbs" are visible and followable by every search engine on earth and open to 99 percent of the world's web surfers regardless of their operating system, device type, and browser age or developer.

There's one other nice thing about the above examples. The breadcrumb format allows Netflix' webmasters to include a number of useful-but-secondary navigation links without cluttering up the page top Navbar.

3. Don't ignore internal content links.

More powerful than may be immediately apparent, actually, since using four different link descriptors in this one short blurb also adds to the content's search-engine appeal.

Tip within a tip: When adding content links to your internal pages try to always use slightly different descriptors and keywords for each link even if they're pointing to the same page.

Good: Reciprocal linking can help build your site traffic

Better: Reciprocal linking, sometimes called link exchanging, can help build your site traffic.

4. Do use NOFOLLOW tags when appropriate.

Everyone knows that a NOFOLLOW tag (rel="nofollow") inserted into a link instructs Google and many other search engines to not parse a page or consider it when ranking the website containing that page.

The reasons for using nofollow tags on a specific page are sometimes less than obvious but generally fall into one of two categories.

1. The page contains links of questionable authority and legitimacy. Examples of these sorts of pages include forum pages, blog pages with unaudited comments, guest book pages, external help pages and-generally - any page where end users can paste information containing hot links to external sites.

The problem with these pages is that those external links may be part of what Google considers "content spam." For instance, a blog comment about SEO may include a "for more information" link pointing to one of those ubiquitous "Adult Friend Finder" pages. AFF not being exactly relevant to your SEO site, the SEs could penalize you for that link unless you use the nofollow tag to warn them away from it.

2. You want to prevent certain pages on your site from sharing and possibly diluting the search value of your other pages.

Some, but by no means all, webmasters believe that Google employs an averaging algorithm in calculating overall site rank and return position. This theory, which may or may not be true, says that if you have a highly ranked page or pages (say a home page with exceptional keyword usage and a ton of good links) Google will apply some of that ranking to pages without links or dynamic content - say a shopping cart or shipping information page - thus diluting the SE value of the home or other page.

Frankly, this theory is not terribly credible, but if you do believe it you should use nofollow tags in links to pages you consider supplemental or incidental.

To add a NOFOLLOW tag to a link, change this:
<a href="http://mysite.com/shippingingo.html">Shipping</a>; to this:
<a href="http://mysite.com/shippingingo.html" rel="nofollow" >Shipping</a>

5. Always organize your site navigation in accordance with the Golden Google Rule

Clicking on "Who We Are" brings up another slate of submenus featuring things like CEO, Marketing Vice President, etc. Clicking on one of those gets you a mug shot and bio of the CEO, marketing veep or whoever. You decide, after clicking around and reading some of these, that your business proposal should best be submitted to the marketing maven.

But, guess what, there's no contact info there. For that, you have to hunt up the Contact Us page, look at some submenus and click the one that says Marketing Inquiries. Which gives you a page directing you to submit your query to the marketing veep at MV@dumbnavbar.com.

What we have just given you is a site where the webmaster has "gone overboard with slicing and dicing -- it takes 20 clicks to get to deep content." YES, that is yet another Google quote and here's Google's simple advice about such slicing and dicing: AVOID IT.

Which isn't to say that Navigation buttons with submenus can't be extremely useful.

Consider your LinksManager-generated links pages. Generally, someone clicking on your Navbar "Resources" (or "Links") button will go to a URL like http://yoursite.com/resources. That's pretty user friendly, but it would be more so if you included submenus to your various categories.

Take a travel site with link categories for air travel, lodging, guided tours and cruises. Setting up submenu items for these categories makes it easier for end users to go directly to the area that interests them most. Instead of "slicing and dicing" and adding steps and pages between the customer and the info he or she wants, it streamlines the process by converting a Navbar that looks like this prior to Resources being selected:

To one that looks like this when the Resources tab is rolled over …

Note: Creating Navbar submenu items varies according to the web design program being used, but is usually quite simple. To get the URLs for the links, just visit your LM category pages and copy/paste the URLs from the browser's address bar.

If you've been regularly visiting the Linking School, you already know about the importance of external content (AKA "deep") links between specific information on one site and related information on another. As it happens, internal content links are equally important.

This time let's steal our example from the Ford Motor Company. Here's the "Vehicles" Navbar link. Fight through it determinedly enough and you'll eventually find information about the 2011 Ford Fiesta.

Now let's look at a screen grab of a Ford.com content blurb about the Fiesta.

Is that or is that not a dynamic way to empower end users to browse directly to the information they want on the 2011 Ford Fiesta?

The Google Golden Rule, an unwritten code of conduct that runs through and connects scores of pages of official Google commentary about building quality websites, goes something like this: Do unto your end users as you would have search engines do unto you.

To put that rule another way, design your website to meet the needs and exceed the expectations of your human visitors and your robotic visitors will be favorably impressed. The end result of proper people-oriented site design? High sales and better rankings.

The converse is equally true. If stumbling around a site not being able to seamlessly get where they want irritates human customers, the chances are good it will also annoy robotic visitors. The end result? Fewer sales and lower rankings.