Usually when we give someone directions to a particular location, we try to make those directions as consise as possible, with plenty of landmarks and street names to use as referrence points for getting from point A to point B. When designing your website, link navigation needs to be just as consise. A website design that has a logical flow to it, with clearly marked pages, and a link navigation structure that allows visitors to move between pages easily serves several purposes.

Don't Create a DMV

Many of us have experienced, or heard horror stories about standing in long lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles, only to get to the window to find out we were in the wrong line and need to start our wait again in a different long line. I'm sure we've all visited websites that reminded us of the DMV.

A website that is easy to navigate often means that people will more readily dig deeper into your website to find the information or items they are looking for. From a web analytics standpoint, this can be measured as pageviews per visit. Higher pageviews per visit (when combined with time on site) typically means that people are satisfied with the content of your website, and are more likely to perform the desired conversion action (make a purchase or fill out a form). It also means that they are more likely to be repeat visitors.

When designing your website, try to implement a web and link structure based not only on your current needs, but as you business grows, how easily will it be to scale up your website and navigation structure. Having a plan in place early on will save you and your customers headaches both now and in the future.

Follow The Hyperlink Road

Sound web design and link structure is not only beneficial to your human website visitors, but to the web crawling visitors as well. A web crawler, which is used by the search engines to analyize and document the contents of your website, rely on the link structure of a website to find its way around. The more logical and complete your linking structure is, particually as a web crawler travels from home page, to parent level pages, to child level pages, the more quickly and completely your website is likely to be indexed. The more indexed pages you have, the more information you have made available in response to a search query.

Hyperlink Tips

1. Link From Your Home Page - Depending on the purpose of your website, try to link to all interior pages from the home page. For deeper websites like those carrying a large inventory, this isn't a practicle solution, but whenever possible try to link from your home page. This is beneficial for both web users and web crawlers to finding the content of your site.
2. Use Clearcut Naming Conventions - The names of your hyperlinks should give your users a pretty good indication about what they can expect to find when they click that link. Hyperlinks that are vaguely named or use acronyms that the average user wouldn't understand can create a poor user experience.
3. Think Like a Superstore - Remember the last time you were in a superstore? Remember what was on the big signs hanging from the isles? They usually start with a master category, and then list some subcategories below to let you know what to expect to find in that isle. If your website requires you to put link directories on interior pages, try to put hyperlinks to master category pages on the home page, and subcategory pages on the appropriate master category web pages.
4. Give Users A Return Ticket - Make sure each interior page has a way for users to easily get back to the previous page and to the home page.
5. Test Your Links- A good link structure is useless if a link is broken and creates a 404 (page not found) error. After you publish your website or add pages, test every hyperlink on all changed pages to make sure they work. You'd be surprised how easy it is to overlook a small detail like forgetting to put an "l" at the end of html and have a link not work.