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Internal linking, structure & UX

Website navigation

Also known as: site navigation, menu

Website navigation is the set of elements that lead visitors and crawlers from page to page. It includes the main menu, footer links, sidebars, breadcrumbs and links within content. For SEO it matters because search engines discover pages by following links. Google’s documentation does not say how much weight it gives navigation links compared with other links.

What forms of navigation exist?

  • Main (top) navigation in the header, with the most important sections
  • Footer navigation for legal and service pages
  • Breadcrumbs showing the path from the home page to the current page
  • Sidebars and filters, common in online shops
  • Contextual links in the page content
  • Mega menus, large dropdowns that show many options in two dimensions

What does Google say about navigation?

Google describes links as a way to connect users and search engines to other parts of a site, and asks for meaningful link text. It recommends descriptive URLs and organizing similar pages in directories, and notes that URL parts can show up as breadcrumbs in search results.

For breadcrumbs, Google describes them as the page’s position in the site hierarchy and supports BreadcrumbList structured data, with at least two items.

Google can only crawl a link that is an <a> element with an href attribute. Menus that create links only on click through JavaScript may therefore not be followed.

Google gives no number of menu items. Fixed upper limits for menu items are usability rules of thumb without a documented basis (assessment).

Example

HTML
<nav aria-label="Main">
  <ul>
    <li><a href="/glossary/">Glossary</a></li>
    <li><a href="/tools/">Tools</a></li>
  </ul>
</nav>

Common mistakes

  • Menu items without a real link
  • Important pages reachable only through internal search
  • Different menus per language or device without a reason

FAQ

What is the navigation of a website? The links and menus visitors use to move between pages.

What is top-level navigation? The main menu items, usually in the header.

Sources

  1. SEO Starter Guide – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
  2. Breadcrumb structured data – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
  3. SEO link best practices – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com

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