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Effective HTML navigation and page linking

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Looking at how your site uses HTML links is an amazing way to make your websites more useable, accessible and increase your search engine ranking.

So for one minute let’s look how Users, Accessible Users and Search engine view your web pages.

The Users view
A user who comes to your website may have come from many different sources including search engines, referring sites, business cards and emails.

The important thing is to remember is that they may not land on your home page.

This one reason underpins why effective navigation is so important.

The Accessible View
A user may not be using a computer in a Convention way. An accessible user may be blind, disabled or have a need for accessible technology to ‘see’ your content.

Links are a vital way that these technologies use to move the user from one piece of content to another. With this in mind the links should be organised in such a way that makes this task as easy as possible.

The search engine view
Search engines use automated pieces of software (call robots) to search for and index websites. Robots do this but searching for HTML friendly links to discover additional content other then pages that has been submitted.

In addition search engines give weight to pages that have inbound links especially if the referring page is of a similar topic to the destination page.

A core set of rules
From the above examples we can drive a core set of guidelines we should try and follow when creating a website.

All navigation links should appear in the same place on each page of the web site and should be consistent in content and make up.
All navigation links should be standard HTML links, or if this is not possible as it may break you design, you should include text versions of the links consistently at the bottom of each page
Try and make links as clear as possible, if space permits instead of having a link that says ‘Contact’ for instance, have ‘contact me’ or ‘click here to contact me’.
Use ALT or TITLE to expand the meanings of your links.
Cross link your content for maximum clarity.
Do not buy in-bound links as this will have the reverse effect.
Only link to external websites where this offers value to your users.
Install a text only web browser and check your website still works, as this gives a rough emulation of how your website views to an accessible user or search engine.
Do not create misleading links to increase SEO as although you may gain some traffic, you will only put off those users actually arriving at your site.
If your chosen design for the website breaks any of the above rules you should consider changing your design as no matter how ‘pretty’ your website is, if it’s not useable, people simply won’t use it.

The above is not finite list but a starting point to considering design from your users view.

HTML is not perfect as it is in a constant state of flux and browsers and technology that builds on top of HTML add to this house of cards.

What is true is that no website would be considered perfect but by reducing the chance where things go wrong, we can provide a great web experience for 95% of the people who use your website.

This article was written by Mark Excell of Websites by Mark