Imagine the plight of the over-worked search engines. They are affectionately known as "crawlers" or "spiders" because they find new pages for their indexes by following links from webpage to webpage to webpage.
However, even Google and Yahoo's super-computers don't have time to find and index every page on the worldwide web. (In fact, only a small portion of the internet is actually indexed.)
So, in preparation for Google's brief, periodic visits to your website, make your navigation menus as streamlined as possible: Make it easy for Google to find every page, so that Google crawls and indexes as much of your website as possible in the least amount of time.
To do so...
- If you have a very small website (2-10 pages), the homepage should include a link to every other page.
- If you have any other size website (10+ pages), the homepage should include links to topic pages, and the topic pages should include links to every sub-topic page within their theme.
In other words, even at 1,000+ page websites, there should only be two (or at the most three) clicks required to get from the home page to any sub-topic page, or even sub-sub-topic page.
For instance, at IssueMarketing.com which features hundreds of book pages, the home page leads to every chapter overview (first click), and each chapter overview includes links to every page within that chapter (second click).
Clearly, however, search engines are not the only users of your website's navigation menus. To test human usability, ask several people who have never visited your website before to find specific content, using only the navigational links (no search boxes). How long does it take end-users to find content on your website? How many clicks?
Keep in mind that internet users don't have much patience. If met with obstacles, they will likely abandon your website before finding the relevant page(s). The same is true of search engine crawlers.
