Among many other factors that make a website great, website navigation is the one that stands out loud. With the help of effective website navigation, it will be very easy for the visitors to find the content they want. And search engines will also be able to crawl through every page of your site.The end result will be in the form of better traffic and improved conversions.

What is website navigation?

Website navigation is based on the links that connect pages of your website with each other. The main purpose of website navigation is to help users find the content they want in a convenient manner.

The pages in your website are discovered and indexed by search engines with the help of website navigation. The linking in website navigation helps search engines understand the content and context of the pages behind the links.

However, the primary purpose of the website navigation is not about influencing the search engines. Users have to be considered on priority. And what’s more important to notice here is that search engines have become smart enough to align themselves with the priorities of users.

Website Navigation & Content Hierarchies

You can relate the website navigation with the index or table of contents of a book. Based on this example, you may be able to assume that the websites may have content hierarchies, which are surely there. You will be able to see categories and subcategories in the website. The categories are the main classifications of the content. These main classifications are further broken down into narrower classifications or subcategories. This type of content hierarchy makes the website’s structure sensible not only for the users but also for the search engines.

The problem with the content hierarchies

While content hierarchy is an extremely important thing to be there in the website, it can lead to some issues related to the search engines activity and the pages ability to gain traffic. The process of categorization and building hierarchies creates content silos. These are the clusters of closely related topics.

The problem with the silos is that they make the pages look like the duplicate content resources. Some of the content silos get more external links, while some might not get as many links. The pages with more links get more traffic. And the pages with fewer links get low traffic.

The content hierarchies can isolate certain page clusters which are located too deep in the hierarchy. Here, you may wonder if there is a way to resolve this issue. Well, there are a few. First, you can categorize content to form category hierarchies. You are going to have to interlink those pages properly.

Secondly, you can find pages that are under different categories but still share similarities. Those pages can be interlinked with each other.