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Small Business Web Design – The Role of Navigation

Colour plays an important part in navigation.
Source: Flickr

Navigation plays a vital role in all small business websites. It is essential in conversion rate optimization. 

Users visit your website because they are interested in your products and services. If they are not able to locate these easily, they would simply favour your competitor over you. 

This is crucial if you own an e-commerce website where good navigation can be the difference between high bounce rate and high conversion rate. 

A neatly arranged and highly reliable navigation is essential to keep your users engaged. Here is a thing or two about tweaking your navigation for higher conversion rates.

Number of clicks

The number of clicks is one of the most important elements of website navigation. Your users must be able to access any desired product, from any point on your website, with the least number of clicks. This is very essential and can often lead to conversion. Try as much as possible to keep it simple for your customers to locate what they want and quickly reach the product pages. You can use any SEO tools to identify trends among your customers, and then suitably alter your web pages to make their work as easy as possible.

Navigation bar placement

Navigation bars can help users to identify where they are at present and how they can reach their desired page. Studies suggest that user observation move from the left side to the right. As a result, it is recommended that you place the navigation bar on the left side of your web page for easy recognition. You can also use the extra space on the left side to promote popular products and offers, as the navigation bar often runs through the width of your page.

Colour and navigation

Colour also plays an important role in website navigation. This is a very important element on web pages for all small business websites. The aesthetics of your site play an important role in attracting your target audience and keeping them engaged. The colours you use on your site will have a significant impact on the aesthetics. 

From complex eye-movement mappings, to simple design concepts, colours can make a huge difference to your conversion rate. As much as possible, try to maintain a contrast between, the background and the colour of your product images, to highlight your product. 

Using colour schemes that match your product while navigating to the product page can also help in easy navigation and add to the value of your product.

A great number of people today are relying on online stores to get the products and services that they desire. On the other hand, the number of e-commerce and small business websites are constantly on the rise. This makes it even more important to implement efficient navigation methods on your website, and to optimize your conversion rates. It is very important to keep the entire process as simple as possible so that, even those who are less adept in technology can benefit from your products and services.

SEO and Source Code

Source: Wikimedia

When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), there are a good number of tools that can help you. 

However, it is the human intelligence, and the good skills of an analyst, which can really help you to promote your small business websites. 

SEO tools can only help you to a certain extent, and eventually, you would have to rely upon the source code of the website to derive exceptional results. 

The source code can provide incredible insights into the functioning of the site, and it allows you to solve SEO problems quickly. 

On the other hand, a small error can damage the website's reputation significantly. Here are a few things you can do to improve your SEO with source code modifications.

Canonical URL tags

Canonical URL tags are helpful when it comes to dealing with duplicate content issues. They are used to bind the links that contain the same content. It is a very good tool when it comes to SEO. 

However, if a Canonical URL tag is not used correctly it can confuse the search engine bots and the result can be disastrous. 

It is best to not use the canonical tag as much as possible and when you do, make sure you are doing it right. If you are not quite sure how the canonical tag may work, it is best to refrain from using it.

Meta robots

Like canonical URL tags, meta robots tags can cause a lot of SEO problems if they are not used correctly. 

The meta robots tags are generally used whenever you do not want the search engines to follow any links on a particular page or you don’t want them to index the page itself. 

Here too, using meta robots tag is not recommended unless it is absolutely necessary. For example, if you are creating a private portal for your business, you would not want it to show up on the search engines.  In this situation, a meta robots tag can come in handy. Otherwise, there is not much need to use these tags.

Script code

A good number of small business websites today use JavaScript. There are two methods you can use to implement JavaScript on your web pages, you can either embed the script on the page itself or you can create a separate file for the script and then call it on the page. 

Using a separate file is the ideal option as excessive script on the web page can slow down the pages and lead to errors. The first thing to do when it comes to SEO is to consolidate all the scripts on your page into separate files. While doing this, you can also check for unnecessary scripts and filter them out to quickly load your web pages

These are just a few different ways in which, your source code can sabotage your SEO efforts. While SEO tools can give you an external outlook at your site's performance, the source code could point you at internal errors that affect your site's performance. It is always a good practice to have a professional SEO analyst look at the source code of your small business websites, to eradicate any SEO issues.