Internal Links are Important Too

Posted by Hans de Ruiter

Yesterday I noticed that someone had found my site by searching for "'_gat' is not an object". This search currently brings up one page which, is a blog entry on this site about XHTML, Firefox and Javascript. However, the visit was listed by Google Analytics as a "bounce," that is, the visitor viewed that one page, and then left my site. Most likely he/she moved on to the page on Weston Ruter's site that I linked to that contains a partial solution to the problem, written in Javascript. If this visitor had bothered to look further on this site, he/she would have discovered that a much simpler, and more effective, solution was presented in this blog post.

The real mistake, however, was not this visitor's; it was mine. Simply having the right information is not enough. A web-site must guide its visitors to that information. If I had edited the blog entry in order to add a link to the next one giving a better solution, the visitor in question may have found that information. I have made this change for the benefit of the anyone else who comes looking for a solution to the same problem. 

It is important to keep this in mind when designing a site, or writing pages within a site. Careful design of the main navigation bars and the main categories will make finding information on a site easy. However, the main navigation bar is only half the picture; cross-linking between pages also aids visitors in finding the information that they desire. If there is something on another page that is relevant to the current page's content, a link to that page (or even section of a page using anchors) will aller a reader to the existence of more related information. This would make your site more valuableto those visiting it. 

Comments (0) | 26 June 2008