Sensible Navigation

There's only one sure-fire way to build substantial site traffic over the long run, and that is to make your site as useful as possible. Although content is king, your navigational scheme also has a lot to do with how useful your site is. One of the main reasons people leave a site after only a few seconds is because they can't find what they're looking for, or are forced to click through page after page to get to the content. See my previous WDVL article ( Nav 101) on navigation for hints on how to build a logical, user-friendly layout.

My recent article on Traffic Tips from your Log Files also makes a good companion article to this one. Analyzing your log files can tell you a lot about the paths people take once they reach your site, and point out areas that could be improved.

To some extent, your navigational scheme will depend on the purpose of your Web site. Back in the good old days of course (2 or 3 years ago), the only purpose a site needed was to share information, but nowadays, in any discussion of site goals and purposes, the question of a "business model" will rear its head. This trendy term basically means "How do you expect to make your money?" Now, there may be endless ways to make money on the Internet, but for the purposes of this article, we'll assume that you're either selling a product or service, or that you're selling ads on the site. Of course, some sites do both, but the navigational implications of these two business models differ, so it makes sense to discuss them separately.

If you're selling a product or service, then your goal is to get the visitor to click on the button that authorizes a transaction, in other words, to buy something. Your whole site exists to guide the visitor to that point, so you don't really care much what other sections of the site they visit, how many pages they see, or whatever. If they come straight from a search engine to the ordering page, hand over their bucks and split, that's fine.

Of course, this doesn't mean you want to herd them blindly to the order button. There is such a thing as informing your customers, and in many cases, the longer they spend perusing your product information, the more likely they'll be to choose just the right model, see how much better your product is than the competition, be impressed with your professional-looking Web site, etc. etc. So include plenty of good-quality content on your site (well-organized, of course), but make sure that order button is right there for those who are ready to click it. Don't make visitors click through a million pages to get to the checkout counter. From every page on your site, the ordering page should never be more than one click away.

To sum up, owners of e-commerce sites are more concerned with their "conversion rate" (the percentage of visitors who are converted to customers) than with the number of page impressions generated.

For an ad-supported site, the traffic goals are a bit different. Since ads are sold by the impression (Each time an ad image is shown to a visitor is one "impression.), every page view may be a couple of pennies in the bank. While an e-commerce site wants to send everyone to the order page, an ad-supported site wants to send each visitor to as many different pages as possible. In this sense, an e-commerce site should be designed like a funnel, and an ad-supported site like a maze.

Now, by invoking a maze, I don't mean to imply that it should be hard for people to find what they want. On the contrary, not only should it be easy for visitors to zero in on exactly the type of content they're looking for, but they should be presented with lots of opportunities to check out closely-related content, so they keep clicking off to explore ever-more-fascinating new worlds, the page impressions keep racking up, and the cyber-cash register rings!

Later in this article, we'll discuss how to maximize traffic with internal links.

Navigation that Works

Nothing chases away visitors faster than a dysfunctional site. Dead links, errors, long page load times, fancy scripts that don't work as they're supposed to...Each of these incidents is a penny out of your pocket. Nay more, because once someone has encountered more than one or two errors on your site, they will probably never return.

No matter how careful you are when working on pages, bad links can creep in, so use a tool like LinkBot ( see WebDevelopersJournal Linkbot Pro Review), which automatically searches your site and tells you of any bad links. Also, just in case, you should have a custom error page on your site. Set up your Web server so that if anyone requests a page that doesn't exist, they are automatically redirected to your error page. The error page contains links to your home page and major sections, your search feature, and the Webmaster's email address. When a visitor arrives at the error page, chances are good they'll stay on your site and try to find what they were looking for. If they just get a generic "404 - Page not found" message, they'll disappear.

One of the biggest problems for e-commerce sites is ordering scripts that simply don't work. Okay, online retail is still fairly new, and a certain amount of chaos is to be expected, but it's appalling to see how many sites, including some of the big names, use fancy-shmancy scripting that crashes half the time. Again, when a script fails to work (or worse yet, locks up the visitor's whole system), not only do you lose that particular sale, but you may permanently lose the respect of a potential customer. Make sure all your scripts have been thoroughly tested, with a variety of browser versions and operating systems.

Build Traffic Through Good Site Design
Navigation and the Search Engines