Depending on your web design, you can generally divide a web page into five zones, the header and footer, the left, right and center. Each of these are ideal for different types of navigation and internal links.

The header traditionally has a graphic or logo. It should also have a link to the home page on all other pages. Basic navigation tabs can be included here although you are often better off having those links in other areas.

For example, the footer, which generally only has a link for the sites designer, is an ideal place to put links to your privacy policy and sitemaps. You should also include a link to your HTML and XML sitemaps in your footer.

The left side or left sidebar is the best place to put internal navigation links. This is the ideal place for internal menus. The should be clearly labeled (using keywords if possible) and easy for your users to navigate.

The right side or right sidebar is where links leaving the page are best placed. This is also the best place to display any banner advertising as those links are leaving the page. If your pages have been developed properly, this will be the second last place (followed by the footer) that is read by the search engine spiders.

The center section is normally devoted to content and so should only have links that keyword rich and leading to appropriate internal pages.

A well designed site will see the header read first, followed by the content, the left side, right side and footer last. Many blogs suffer as their design calls for them to be read with the header first, the sidebars second and the content after the sidebars. The footer of course is last.

Good web design takes into account how your users access the page. They also need to take into account how the search engine spiders read the page.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 at 12:04 pm and is filed under SEO, Web Design. 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.