Understanding which of your pages are likely entry pages helps you to optimize those pages for
search engine crawlers. Using the pet-store example, if your home page and all the hub pages are
properly SEO’ed, you potentially could be ranked at or near the top of five different sets of search
results. When you add additional entry pages deeper in your web site structure (that is, a dogtraining
section to the hub for dogs), you’ve increased the number of times you can potentially
end up at the top of search engine rankings.
Because entry pages are important in the structure of your web site, you want to monitor those pages
using a web-site analytics program to ensure they are working the way you expect them to work. A
good analytics program, like Google Analytics, will show you your top entry and exit pages.
Exit pages are those from which users leave your site, either by clicking through an exiting link,
selecting a bookmark, or typing a different web address into their browser address bar. But why
are exit pages important? They have two purposes; the first is to drive users from their entry
pages to a desired exit page. This is called the path that users travel through your site. A typical
path might look something like this:
SERP ? Home ? Women’s Clothing ? Product Pages ? Shopping Cart ? Checkout ? Receipt
In this example, Home is the entry page and Receipt is the exit page. By looking at this navigational
path, you can tell how users travel through your page and where they fall off the page. But there’s an
added benefit to understanding the navigational path of your users. When you know how users
travel through your site, you can leave what’s called a bread-crumb trail for them. That’s a navigational
indicator on the web site that allows them to quickly see where they are on your site, as shown
in Figure 3-6. This is the navigation path shown on the Wal-Mart web site. You can quickly see
where in the navigational structure of the site you’re located.
The bread-crumb trail not only helps users return to a previous page in the navigational path; it also
makes it easier for a web crawler to fully examine your site. Because crawlers follow every link on
your page, this is an internal link structure that leads crawlers to individual pages that you want to
have included in search engine results.
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