Just like in a physical store, it’s important to merchandise your navigation pages with information about what products are on sale, the promotions you’re running, what items are marked for clearance, and any other specials that you’re offering. There are a few ways to showcase this information – refinements, banners, and specialized landing pages are a few examples. Below are a couple tips to get you started.

1. Have merchandising-specific refinements — Refinements don’t have to be limited to product details. Visitors want to know what sales items, special offers, bundles and clearance items, you’re offering. Allowing them to refine by these factors is a great way to improve the usability of your site, and guide visitors to items you are promoting, while improving conversion potential.

2. Rank the products in a way that makes sense for your business — Many companies choose to order their products by popularity. This minimizes the amount of clicks people will typically make to get to the products they’re looking for. Consider also showing your highest margin products first, or the ones you have excess stock for.

You can separate the results into “items on special promotion” and “most popular items” for example, or show all items in the same results list, but with the top 5 items in excess stock first followed by the most popular items. We occasionally encounter websites that rank their products alphabetically by default. This is almost always a non-optimal way to rank your products, although it is sometimes a useful sort option.

For more tips, download the full ebook – Big Book of Navigation Tips.

When approaching navigation it’s important to remember that search engine spiders are a key audience. Google, Bing and other search engines analyze site navigation structures as they crawl your site to understand what’s important. For example, if a product page is only two clicks away from the home page it will be considered more important than one that is four or five clicks away. Not only should the pages be able to be crawled, but in many cases they should also be indexed. So be sure to follow SEO best practices when designing navigation pages so they rank well in natural search results.

Below are some tips to help you in this regard. You can find the complete set of SEO tips by downloading the complete “Big Book of Navigation Tips,” available from our website. Next week we’ll provide some tips related to online merchandising in navigation so be sure to check back.

1. Ensure your navigation pages can be crawled by Internet search engines. To ensure your navigation pages can be crawled by Internet search engines, use short URLs that include useful keywords to your navigation pages (e.g., category or subcategories) with very little parameters. Avoid using javascript-produced links because the spiders may have trouble interpreting these. Also ensure that navigation pages are not excluded in your robots.txt file.

2. Include title and <h1> tags on your navigation pages. Customize your title and <h1> tags to include the category title of each category page. These are both located at the top of category pages and are factors that search engines consider when ranking a page. The text in the title tag appears in the search engine results – so it should be accurate, unique and compelling. You may also want to include subcategories within the title tag to help rank for those more specific keywords.

3. When making any changes to your navigation, consider what to do with your old navigation links. The main issue is the old navigation links may have generated great SEO results. You will likely want your new navigation pages to benefit from your old navigation pages’ popularity. The recommended way of handling this is to use a 301 redirect. This will redirect the old navigation links to any equivalent new navigation link. By doing this, the value of the old page will be linked to the new page, minimizing the negative impact on your SEO.

Refinements are an important part of navigation, as they help narrow a broad category so visitors get to items they’re looking for more quickly – and also help them get to particular items to suit their needs such as size, brand, style, or price faster. There is no shortage of options for how to present navigation refinements, which means some retailers offer too many choices or they present refinements in a way that confuses the visitors. Below are a couple of tips to guide you in this area. You can find a whole slew of refinement tips by downloading the complete “Big Book of Navigation Tips,” now available from our website.

Next week we’ll cover SEO, so stay tuned.

1. Consider using sliders for continuous refinements Test the placement of refinements – Using sliders for refinements like price or size range take up less space and are a nice tool to use along with AJAX to build smooth transitions from one information display to the next. Some visitors may find them more complicated than the alternatives – links or drop downs with fixed ranges, or text boxes allowing you to specify an upper and lower limit. So test and make sure your visitors do understand how they work and consider offering alternatives. Make sure your sliders work well on a touch screen device, and if they don’t you can  provide alternative way of displaying them.

2. Make sure navigational images can’t be confused as products – Navigation usability tests were conducted by showing participants a retail site with three product subcategories represented by an image and the associated text description. Many participants misunderstood that  the images were representations and took them to be three product images and assumed there were only three products. You should try to avoid these types of misunderstandings as much as possible. You can minimize confusion on navigation pages by showing products as well as subcategories. You can show other cues that will help differentiate between subcategories and products – such as showing the number of results they’ll see if they click on the subcategory images, label the subcategory images clearly and make sure there’s a clear distinction between the layout of your products and subcategories.