Website Link Heirarchy/Organization

[melchapman]

Hello... Not sure if this is the correct place for this question, but here it goes.

I am in the process of building a huge content driven website. It is approximately 500+ pages of real estate and community information.

My Question:
Where is the best place to put 'Find Your Way Back' links? Top, bottom, left side, right side?

Example: There will be main pages made for the types of real estate, then there will be main pages made for the major cities, then pages for the main communities, and then sub pages for the smaller communities within the main ones.

I want people to be able to navigate to other areas, if they wish, or go back to where they were without clicking the back button. Plus, I need it to be friendly for the search engines as well.

Confused? Sorry if so... I don't know any other way to explain it. If you need more info, just ask.

Thanks in advance,
Mel

[ljm]

I usually see those at the bottom of the page. I used to use them on personal sites, but don't use them on professional sites. Site visitors usually know how to use the browser back-button anyhow.

Linda

[Steven1976a]

As well as your normal menu links you could also use bread crumbs so that people know where they have come from and can easily navigate back.

As an example you will see on this site below the search box

http://www.marksandspencer.com/gp/br...A2BO0OYVBKIQJM

You will see the trail that i have taken from the homepage which i can easily navigate back to any of the previously visited pages

Homepage » Home & Furniture » Sofas & Armchairs » Ashbourne

[melchapman]

Bread crumbs won't work because a visitor could have gotten to that page by maybe three other pages.

For example. A community may be a new construction single family home, on the golf course and in a gated community. So the community would be listed on the 'single family homes' page, the 'golf course community' page, the 'new construction' page and the 'gated community' page.

Another reason to provide link backs is for link popularity purposes. I do know search engines like to see good organization. Providing hyperlinks using key phrases to the appropriate page is also effective.

[ljm]

How would you use key phrases in a 'back' link which (as I understand it) is usually done with JavaScript?

Linda

[melchapman]

Let's say you are at my homepage and you go to the main market area page, Jacksonville. The title of that page is

Jacksonville Real Estate - Jacksonville Florida Real Estate - Jacksonville FL

These are the main key phrases that are being optimized, right? So from the Jacksonville page, I click on a community 'Jacksonville Beach'.

On the Jacksonville Beach page, at the bottom or the side, where ever I decide to put the back links, I would have a place that says, "Find your way back to..." and one of the links would say Jacksonville Real Estate. 'Jacksonville Real Estate' is the key phrase that is linked back to the page they just came from. Same would go for if the visitor came from the 'Oceanfront Real Estate' page. There would be a link on the page that says 'Oceanfront Real Estate'.

The same concept is used when working on link popularity. If I wanted to increase the popularity and the PR for two sub pages in the site, I would ask for back links, one would say 'Jacksonville Real Estate' and the other (located on a different site) would say 'Jacksonville Beach'.

I know for a fact that Google acknowledges and counts this type of linking within the site and can count towards the PR which is really cool when you have a 500+ page website.

I don't know if you already knew this, but if you didn't, I hope the explanation was clear. Sometimes I am pretty bad about writing my explanations. My brain goes faster than my typing. :)

[ljm]

If you're talking about making HTML links to the various sections of your site, using keywords, I recommend putting them at the top of the left-side column of your site, where search engines can easily find them.

Linda

[melchapman]

Originally Posted by ljm

If you're talking about making HTML links to the various sections of your site, using keywords, I recommend putting them at the top of the left-side column of your site, where search engines can easily find them.

Linda

Yeah... but wouldn't they want to see the relevant content first and foremost. They read left to right, top to bottom. I would think navigation links would go on either the right side or bottom.

I don't know... now i am confused.

[ljm]

I own an activist website with a lot of content on the front page. Before the spiders can read it they go past all my links.

To answer your question, I took some content I'd written within the last month from the front page and ran it through the Google search engine, and it gave me back the correct page link.

This tells me that your links at the top of the page or left-hand column will not prevent the spiders from reading the rest of the content on your page.

I hope this helps.

Linda

[ljm]

And about the navigation links - most professional web designers I know put them both at the top of the page and at the bottom. The top links may be stylish in some way using graphics, javascript, css, or dhtml. The bottom links are usually plain. This is because we want the site visitors to easily get around on the site.

Linda