Website Footer Best Practices
This blog entry was posted on November 18, 2011.
Footer navigation should be placed at the bottom of each web page. These are usually identical on all pages in your site. Website footers act as a macro sitemap to the key pages on your site. Footer links make it easier for visitors to navigate your site without having to scroll back to the top of the page. Including an address in the footer helps visitors and helps establish the location of your company, especially for local search.
Footer links help search engines index your website, particularly if the primary navigation is formed in Flash or JavaScript. It can act as a condensed version of your site map.
Local Search: If yours is a local business seeking local customers, then having your address including city and state in the footer identifies your location for both search engines and visitors. You can even include the communities that you serve.
Usability: Footers should be designed first with usability and visitor experience in mind rather than just the search engines. As a general rule, if it’s good for your visitors it will help your search rankings. If you are forming your footers only around a SEO strategy, you should think long and hard about it.
Pages: Which pages should be included in your footer links? This should include about-us, contact, privacy policy, terms of use, sitemap and links to key services or products. Include your copyright information as well.
Number of links: How many links should be in the footer navigation? Typically up to a dozen. Large scale footers are rarely good for visitors or for SEO. Organizing links into natural categories makes it easier to visually locate an individual page.
Google suggests that any page not exceed 100 links. Having too many footer links may put every page in the site over this suggested limit.
If You Like this posting please +1 it!
Related posts:
Filed under: Web Usability
This entry was posted on Friday, November 18th, 2011 at 4:45 am and is filed under Web Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.No Comments
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post. | TrackBack URL
