Navigation: The Most Common Mistakes
Messing up your website's navigation is more critical then you think at first, and the most common mistakes are often overlooked. It doesn't only affect your traffic and ranking in the SERPs but it also affects conversions and the UI.
#1: Weirdly placed navigation
Visitors tend to look for the usual: a horizontal navigation across the top or a vertical navigation often seen in web applications (GMail). When you move your navigation away from these positions then your visitors probably won't dive deeper into your website, resulting in an higher bounce rate and less visits per page. So when you keep your navigation in the traditional pages you can expect the opposite: Lower bounce rate and more page visits.
#2: Generic labels on your buttons
Shouldn't navigation be descriptive? It should. Labelling your menu with terms like "Our Products" or "Where We Work" is way too generic. It doesn't communicate with your visitors. If your navigation tells about your service or products then your site instantly communicates. While you're at it, plan your site's navigation with Google in mind.
#3 Drop downs
Dropdowns are bad? Yes they are horrible. And for 2 reasons: search engines find it difficult to crawl your site based on a drop down menu. The other (most important) reason is that drop down annoy your visitors. You might think they are cool, cut the NN Group's usability study says otherwise. Visitors move their mouse faster then they move their mouse, so they click on the button, but then they suddenly see alot more options pop out, while the new page is already loading! This is bad a bad UX.
Are all drop downs bad? You should be familiar with the "mega" drop down menu's (Amazon) those have been tested to actually work quite well.
#4 Stuffing your menu's
Study has proven that the average short term memory only remembers 7 items. Keeping this is mind we should try to limit ourselves to using 5 items per navigation to optimize our clicks and to lower our bounce rate. When the visitor has fewer options to view then they are less likely to miss the important ones. In turn, removing certain menu items makes the other stand out more.
Not only is this better for your visitors, it's also better for the big G. You should have heard about the term "link juice". This is like real liquid, it can flow from your home page into the deeper pages. Why your home page? Because the most links to your site will be to the home page, thus that page will have the most authority and will contain the most "link juice". This should ring a bell by now. Having too much links dilutes your link juice, the more precise and focused your navigation is the more juice will pase on the interior pages, making them more easy to rank.
#5 Using images as buttons
Don't use images as buttons, instead discipline yourself to always use text based links and style them with CSS to make them look like a button. Please. Image based buttons are not search engine friedly and they basically block crawlers from scanning your website. Another reason is updating. When you want to update your navigation using image based buttons then you have to launch up Photoshop every single time, whilst if you use text based buttons you can easily adjust them every time.
#1: Weirdly placed navigation
Visitors tend to look for the usual: a horizontal navigation across the top or a vertical navigation often seen in web applications (GMail). When you move your navigation away from these positions then your visitors probably won't dive deeper into your website, resulting in an higher bounce rate and less visits per page. So when you keep your navigation in the traditional pages you can expect the opposite: Lower bounce rate and more page visits.
#2: Generic labels on your buttons
Shouldn't navigation be descriptive? It should. Labelling your menu with terms like "Our Products" or "Where We Work" is way too generic. It doesn't communicate with your visitors. If your navigation tells about your service or products then your site instantly communicates. While you're at it, plan your site's navigation with Google in mind.
#3 Drop downs
Dropdowns are bad? Yes they are horrible. And for 2 reasons: search engines find it difficult to crawl your site based on a drop down menu. The other (most important) reason is that drop down annoy your visitors. You might think they are cool, cut the NN Group's usability study says otherwise. Visitors move their mouse faster then they move their mouse, so they click on the button, but then they suddenly see alot more options pop out, while the new page is already loading! This is bad a bad UX.
Are all drop downs bad? You should be familiar with the "mega" drop down menu's (Amazon) those have been tested to actually work quite well.
#4 Stuffing your menu's
Study has proven that the average short term memory only remembers 7 items. Keeping this is mind we should try to limit ourselves to using 5 items per navigation to optimize our clicks and to lower our bounce rate. When the visitor has fewer options to view then they are less likely to miss the important ones. In turn, removing certain menu items makes the other stand out more.
Not only is this better for your visitors, it's also better for the big G. You should have heard about the term "link juice". This is like real liquid, it can flow from your home page into the deeper pages. Why your home page? Because the most links to your site will be to the home page, thus that page will have the most authority and will contain the most "link juice". This should ring a bell by now. Having too much links dilutes your link juice, the more precise and focused your navigation is the more juice will pase on the interior pages, making them more easy to rank.
#5 Using images as buttons
Don't use images as buttons, instead discipline yourself to always use text based links and style them with CSS to make them look like a button. Please. Image based buttons are not search engine friedly and they basically block crawlers from scanning your website. Another reason is updating. When you want to update your navigation using image based buttons then you have to launch up Photoshop every single time, whilst if you use text based buttons you can easily adjust them every time.
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