Maryland Web Design: How To Organize Your Footer For Enhanced Usability And Seo

By Author: Erica Ronchetti
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Maryland businesses, does your website have a modern sitemap and footer? In many cases, footers go underutilized. Recently, many websites have begun to make use of footers, and footer space has since been revamped—not only from the perspective of the web designer but for purposes of search engine optimization as well. Website design for improved usability and SEO is a win-win situation. Let a Maryland website design company walk you through this important web design trend so your online business can benefit from improved navigation, easy website indexing, and interlinking.

If your website has a less than optimal footer, it may be off-putting to visitors. A drab looking footer is a sign that a web designer didn’t consider the footer important enough to put time into—a good footer emphasizes user experience and adds SEO/SEM benefits.

Footer Web Design and SEO: Increased Web Page Interlinking

Designing your footer in a categorized manner, i.e. categories of pages, articles, archives, etc… increases web page interlinking and helps direct the Google search ...
... bots into your website for the indexing of all available web pages. If your top menu is JavaScript, search engines are certainly going to miss it. A footer menu helps engines index important website pages.

Many websites have a sitemap with all web pages listed out for the purpose of helping both visitors and search engine spiders find the information they’re looking for. A recent web design trend, modern websites (both big corporation sites and small portfolios as well) are choosing to drop this sitemap page and place the sitemap in the footer area. They then cleverly organize this footer to enhance usability.

Web Design with Usability in Mind: The Benefits of Placing Your Sitemap in the Footer

Consider This: In many cases, your visitors will be too lazy to click on your sitemap for navigation, or they may miss the sitemap link entirely.Placing your sitemap in the footer will ensure that your visitors see every page available. It’ll also allow your visitors to easily jump from page to page.

Engage Your Visitors: Designing your website so the sitemap is in the footer is one way to catch readers’ attention and possibly increase view and page clicks. When browsing websites, readers rarely review everything on a webpage, rather scan and scroll quickly. Your footer may be the last thing they see before exiting out of a webpage. Making every link organized and available may catch their attention.

Be Selective: You don’t have to include all links in your footer—rather, aim to use it as a location for promoting important pages. If you aren’t sure which links to include in your footer, a sitemap will effectively fill up the page space to make your site appear bigger.

Footer-Sitemap Web Design Examples:

Let’s consider a company with a huge website in terms of content. Putting an entire sitemap in the footer may not be the best idea. www.apple.com does it right – they have a well-organized sitemap that they’ve split into sections. If you’re browsing the Ipod section, you’ll only view the Ipod footer—relevant to iPod products. You may also want to consider displaying a simplified sitemap in your footer, and including a link to a full sitemap.

Web Design Tips: How To Design an Organized Footer Sitemap

The first step is to organize all links into appropriate categories. What offered services are similar? Which products are relevant and related? Make use of headings. Per each category you create, label them with an appropriate title or heading.

Learn more about footer designs – let a Maryland web design company provide more information and resources for your website.

Erica Ronchetti is a freelance writer for Maryland Website Design, Social Media and Website Content Writing Company. We have years of experience in marketing, writing, sales, Web site design, e-commerce, content management systems, flash animation, and information architecture. Learn more about Web Design Maryland and Maryland Website Design by visiting our website.