The general Website navigational menu structure is determined by the website layout/structure. Once the navigational structure is chosen i.e. 2 tier, 3 tier etc then you need to determine the link names.

Navigation Menu Structure

Your website navigation should be kept as simple as possible and you should avoid having a large navigation menu. Generally you will have two web site navigation menu bars on a web page.

Because the side menu area has more space, it usually has the larger menu bar and hence I call it the main site navigation menu with the top or bottom menu bar containing navigational links to general web pages like content, about us, privacy etc -a mini website navigation menu.

It is normal to repeat this 'mini' menu (general menu on each and every page).

 In a small website 5-10 pages then left hand menu (main navigational menu)  will probably link to every web page in the site. In a large site the left hand menu (main navigational menu) should be context sensitive and be relevant to the pages directly underneath it.

As an example imagine a website about fashion the  main site navigation menu ( on the home page) would have links like:

• women's fashion
• men's fashion
• Children's fashion

The women's fashion link would point to a web page on women's fashion in general which would link to specific aspects of women's fashion like

• women's shoes
• women's scarf's
• women's skirts
• women's tops

This is illustrated below:

Naming Navigation links

What is crucial to remember is that the Navigation links will not only be used by our human visitors but also by our web spiders. These links are your internal links i.e. they point to web pages within our website. As with external links the correct naming of the links can have an impact on our search engine rankings.

In evaluating links search engines give special relevance to the text surrounding the link and the anchor text that makes up a link. As far as Navigational links are concerned we only have the anchor text.

The Navigational Menu should be built from keywords that reflect your website. The example fashion site above illustrates a good naming strategy. Our home page navigation menu would look like this:

Women's fashion
Men's fashion
Children's fashion

and on the women's page the navigation menu would look like this:

Women's shoes
Women's scarf's
Women's skirts
Women's tops
 

Related Articles and Resources:

• Positioning The Navigation Bar/menu on the Web Page
• Site Navigation Link Types- Plain text, graphical etc.