Header Navigation and SEO
Often, people may only have a vague idea of what they’re looking for in the Internet. That’s why many people search by a broad keyword.
Broad keywords such as shoes, books, and sports are short and not specific. These keywords are difficult to rank #1, because so many other websites might have articles that mention shoes, sports, or any other broad keyword. However, if you rank well for a broad keyword, you will be receiving a great deal of traffic.
To rank your store for a broad keyword with a high level competition, include the keyword into your header navigation. The trick works because the header navigation has the benefit of being the same on every store page.
How the Trick Works
For example, CS-Cart uses a Product Mega Navigation concept to include links to main categories and subcategories. The Mega Menu links are visible only when the customer hovers a mouse cursor over the header. When the search engine crawlers visit the site, they crawl and index all of the pages in the Mega Menu.
Because CS-Cart Mega Menu links to many categories, all of those categories receive a share of link juice. And because that header with the Mega Menu is the same across every page of the site—every page shares a small amount of link juice it has with these category pages as well. That’s amazingly powerful for SEO.
By contrast, you can use the left navigation that will contain links specific only to the category, or filtered product set that the customer has navigated to. The links in the left navigation have local link juice power. The links in the left hand category navigation share link juice that those less juicy pages have with each other. But they do not get a share of link juice from other departments or from the homepage of your store.
Only links in the site-wide navigation elements, such as the header, benefit from whole-site link juice infusions.
Other site-wide navigation elements, such as the footer or your right or left navigation, will also work fine, if they are the same and present on every store page.
About the Author:
Fotis Kourmadas
Owner and SEO at CSCart.biz and CS-Cart Hellas:
Thank you guys for the great opportunity to guest blog at CS-Cart Blog. If any readers have questions or comments, I will gladly answer them. Just contact me at [email protected] or just post the question below the article.
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Yan Anderson is the Head of Content Marketing at CS-Cart with over 10 years of experience in the eCommerce industry. He's passionate about explaining complicated things in simple terms. Yan has expertise in building, running and growing eCommerce marketplaces. He loves to educate people about best practices, new technologies, and trends in the global eCommerce industry.