Breadcrumbs
A number of websites use Breadcrumbs to help and improve navigation.
All websites start with one page and if you only have a handful of pages then some horizontal navigation will be fine. As the number of pages expands adding some dropdown links again might do the job. However, once the number of pages starts to increase the only form of navigation which is likely to work, and will be a viable solution to supplement the main navigational pillars is to add some breadcrumbs.
Breadcrumbs do require a degree of planning to help illustrate this concept please see Supermarkets…
Do Your URLS – Website Page Addresses Make Sense
URLs the domain name plus the name of the page.
or
Which one is most descriptive?
https://dainty-group.co.uk/?page.id=868
or
https://dainty-group.co.u.uk/tipper-hire/grab-truck-hire/
If it is easy to see where you are on a website, when the url tells you where you are, that is good. If you can understand it, so can Google, just because you went to school with the developer of the ?page.id-868 it does not follow that they will do you a good job.
I spoke to a company and pointed out their URLs were not optimised. The person on the other end explained that the companies owner had gone to school with the developer more than 40-years ago and they were best buddies.
OK – I can understand that on one level, but just because you went to school with someone who runs a software business does not mean they will create you a search engine friendly website.
If the URLs are less than optimal chances are lots of other parts will not be optimised either.
For example encouraging you to have multiple websites with the same content. Duplicate content far from doubling your chances of being found will do the opposite.
Having numerous similar domain names with the same or similar content might have been a good strategy many years ago, but I would not advise that in these days.
My friend Tim built a huge website, he bought in a number of databases from various places and joined them together to create a directory covering many topics from golf courses to hotels etc across the UK. He ran Google Ads on the site and was making £2k per month in ad revenue. Tim then had the idea of doubling his revenue each month by creating a very similar site, but with a different domain name. The result was that both sites ended up on the second page of results. Far from doubling his income, Tim had massively reduced it. Revenue dropped so much he packed in both sites.
He asked me what had gone wrong?
“Duplicate content” I replied.
Does Google always detect duplicate content? It is hard to know but in my experience these days I would advise one website and make that the best it can be.
One website might also save you some money on hosting fees, SSL certificates, and such like.