Categories, Structure and Navigation in 5 Words:
Words, Map, SEO, Time-Saving
Sometimes it’s easy to work out which categories your site needs and that will dictate your navigation for your visitors. But have you found all the words possible?
Falling Down The Word Mine
With an e-commerce site, your product and your product ranges will be neat and easy to follow and the navigation will be simple but what if you are offering a service? There is a glut of tools, including Google, for mining words either building from a list you type in or from a Website. You’ll have a very deep and dark pit of words to mine.
A Big Bit of Paper
When planning a site from scratch, do the word mine thing and start to map out the categories by using the most searched for terms at your top level of categories. Look at the metadata of the top ranking competitor sites in your market for further clues. Build from other sources (like the chapters of a book) and constantly refine and simplify. You want to end up with a comprehensive list of all the categories your site will ever need.
Categories Dictate Navigation
Visitors scan web pages and do not have the patience to come to terms with any idiosyncratic navigation or categories that seem illogical to them. Doing this work at the start of building a Website will save you time and money and flow into your SEO programme.
Time-Saving is Money Saving
Keep asking yourself questions during this period of category building, perhaps use a simple thinking tool like mind-mapping, or the big piece of paper or a spreadsheet, whatever you use you will overlook something unless you put in the effort. We recently had a customer who told us a search term that was where he wanted to take his business, it appeared nowhere on his site. Take your time to save even more time and save money by creating your categories from the start.
Mining words can be a slog and building categories seem unimportant but it is vital for all of your online activities.
All the best,
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