Lee Gomes has written an article in Forbes today discussing how Google could make Web site design and navigation obsolete.
The article makes a valid point which a lot of designers forget – most visitors from Google probably won’t arrive at the homepage. They arrive at one of the internal pages instead.
because of search engines, users end up never encountering that home page or availing themselves of the careful arrangement of the site’s material.
Instead, they’re taken directly to the inside page that has the specific material they are looking for. And once they find what they’re looking for, they’re off somewhere else.
So far so good but I disagree with the next part.
What that means, says Jerry Sheehan of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, is that Web developers shouldn’t sweat the details of how a site is pieced together, since Google will only end up hiding a lot of that work from many, if not most, Web users.
The fundamental issue is that a web user who arrives on an internal page is either going to leave the site, buy a product directly from the page or visit some other pages – the homepage being the most popular one. The big test of a websites navigation and architecture is whether the user who lands on a particular page and then browses round the site can ever find that original page again.
If your navigation doesn’t allow people to find all your pages easily from your homepage then visitors will leave in frustration.
So good navigation and design are just as important as ever.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
If anything, having users deeplink into your website more often would make for more work as you have to pay even more attention to landing page optimisation to ensure those visitors find what they’re looking for and convert.
You are right – this just makes good structure and easy navigation even more important.
Perhaps the whole concept of a home page becomes meaningless in the sense that a site visitor could land anywhere in your site so every page becomes the home page and your visitor must be able to navigate easily around your site from there – if it’s at all difficult to navigate or they are confused as to where they are, they’ll be off somewhere else.
Exactly what is it that Google hides anyway? Nothing as far as I can see.
I think what it does highlight is the need to design your internal pages well and not just worry about the homepage.
Many web designs start out looking at the homepage, but it’s often a good idea to concentrate on the content pages first, which will eventually carry the most traffic, and then worry about the homepage.
>>If your navigation doesn’t allow people to find all your pages easily from your homepage then visitors will leave in frustration.<<
The above was true when Netscape Navigator 1.0 came out and is still true today. I completely agree with your points; while Google is a huge part of the Internet, word-of-mouth will always get folks discovering your site too (and they had better be able to navigate it well).
Interesting thoughts.. What I, more and more, often do is checking if the visitor is coming from a search engine or ref. site. In those cases I change the content to be more welcoming and present a message or some special modules to get the visitor more interested in going further into the site.
All the pages and the navigation will need to be optimised as usual, obviously for all points made above. If you end up on a deep page thanks to a google search you want want to navigae out of that page to look at other services or products, not to mention that if someone is seriously interested in his website’s performance he will also market it in places other than such search engines, ie word of mouth, ad campaigns etc. I agree that this probably makes the ‘easy navigation’ argument stronger.
It’s the design of the home page and navigation structure that enables those internal pages to rank for those long tail keywords. Proper internal linking to pass the page rank around, else those internal pages won’t get any search traffic.
I’m actually starting to not give a damn on Google PR. On the other hand I like simplicity used by Google products and I agree that the design should be a few steps backward of page content.
Homepages lost their purpose years ago, and great sites have “re-purposed” their homepages. No matter what, people will orient themselves within a site, based on the homepage, thus making it an essential need from a user’s psychological point of view. This explains why people land into a site, then often go to the homepage. Savvy web users, and soon all web users, regard the homepage as a type of brand and navigational view of the site. It offers transparency into what is in the entire site, and how the site owner “weighs” the content they offer. Think of it as one part sitemap, one part brochure, and one part tag cloud.
I recently wrote an article for local, niche and small businesses about what the homepage truly is and how to organize content for it.
I agree…makes site navigation more important…not less
A website overall must be correctly structured on every page. It is very common that the initial page a user may stumble on is not the homepage. Therefore it is essential that all pages follow the same method. They must all have an effective functionality, a good range of keywords and the correct positioning of H1, H2 titles etc.
A designer tends to put all thought and effort into the homepage, thinking that this is the most important page. In essence, it is but must be carried throughout the website to comply with Google search engine optimisation standards.
I absolutely agree with Keith!
“No matter what, people will orient themselves within a site, based on the homepage, thus making it an essential need from a user’s psychological point of view. This explains why people land into a site, then often go to the homepage”
If your navbar doesn’t allow people to find all your pages easily from your index page then the most of visitors will leave in frustration.
This is a good post Patrick. I read that article in Forbes and I was outraged. I mean how can someone
a) think this crap?
and
b) print this crap?
The author completely forgets that the visitor to an internal page will also be seeing a page design, just not the home page design. And if you want people to hang around you’d better have an easy link structure. So for me I think it’s more important, because you have to make it easy for people to think stay, while not compromising the main content and the reason they have visited.
For me homepage has always been smth symbolic, it’s like the face, representing the whole object. And it can be obsolete only for search engine, coz it’s engine
, but never for people.
How can SEO and a search engine marketing campaign improve Leadsmarketer website (www.leadsmarketer.com) position in the search engines? Our marketing and sales department invested a lot of resources in writing all the content for our web site but we just can’t seem to be ranking high enough in the engines, while our competition is on top. Do we have to re-write it all over again?
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