I find the footer of a page really useful for summarizing the contents of your website. The footer is a place where people will look for quick information. For example, they want to find out what country the website is operating from or want your address. The footer allows this information to be easily accessible, making it an overall more user friendly environment.

After reading what others thought should appear in the footer on a page, I thought I would write about what I think should be there.

There are in no particular order.

Second Order Links

Do you have any links that aren’t of enough importance to appear amongst your “main navigation”? If you do, why not place them in the footer? They are acessible from every page and do not intrude on the look of your site. Here’s a few examples of what could be listed.

• About us
• Privacy Policy
• Terms and Conditions
• Postal Address and Country of Origin
• A simple link back to the website designer
• A link to the home page

Blog Links

If your website, like mine does not have the blog as the main page, why not link to a few of the “Top Articles” or the “Recently Viewed Articles”. As long as these articles are relevant, I believe they should help with the keywords and their density on each page. Not only does it help with keywords, but if a user gets to the bottom of your page after not clicking on anything, they may find something of interest amongst the results in the footer. This in turn could decrease the “bounce back” rate of your site as the user is still active and has not left.

Be careful when adding blog links, if the blog entry is not relevant, it could play havock with the keywords on the main page by lowering their density. Why not pick a relevant category and add the ones which have been recently read?

Jobs

I am sure you have all come across websites that offer jobs. If the site has vanacies which do not need to be filled quickly, you could add a small link to the jobs page in the footer. Once a user has finished reading the content of your site they will get to the footer and if the content is good enough and there are jobs available, they will more than likely have a look.

Back to the top

This is something that quite a few websites I have visited have included in their footer. It is simply a link that takes you back to the top of the page. This makes it easier for the user visiting your page to return to the main area of the site where the links reside and hopefully extend their stay.

Feedback

It is always good to know what other people think of your website. A feedback link would allow them to actually tell you what they think. Whether this be a javascript pop up (for those with javascript enabled) or a seperate page. People may not use it often but on the odd occasion they do, you might get some helpful tips.

Well there’s my list. I hope you enjoyed what I had to say.

I look forward to any comments.

Jack

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