The website navigation menu should be at the place where people expect it. The menu should be at the top of the page, or on the left side of your web page. Do not use fancy designs or unusual symbols. It must be easy to find and identify the website navigation menu on all pages of your website.

Cluttered and confusing menus will alienate your website visitors. Your website navigation menu should be clear and logical.

Most website visitors don't want to think. They want a quick solution, and they want it now. Make sure that the links to the most important pages of your website can be found easily. It's not necessary to link to every single page of your website in the website navigation menu.

If your website has categories and sub categories, it's usually enough to link to the categories in the menu. Then you can link to the sub category pages from the category pages.

The easier your website navigation menu is to understand, the more people will use it. The link to your home page should be labeled 'Home'. The links to your category pages should use descriptive words that make clear what the categories and linked pages are about.

Do not use generic words in your menu. If the linked page is about brown shoes, the website navigation menu item should be labeled 'brown shoes'. Don't make your website visitors guess. If it makes sense, include the words for which you want to get high rankings in the menu items.

You can use JavaScript to enhance the look of your website navigation menu. However, the basic menu should work without JavaScript. Some people disable JavaScript for security or privacy reasons. These people won't be able to navigate on your website if your menu requires JavaScript. In addition, most search engines cannot fully parse JavaScript.

Today's Internet is mobile-first! It's essential that your website and your website menu works on mobile devices. There's no way around that.

Use the hamburger menu symbol (three horizontal lines) to show your website menu on mobile phones. Users are used to that symbol and it makes it easier to find your website menu on smartphones. The symbol looks like this:

The font size should be easy to read on mobile phones. If your website has a search feature, it should be easy to reach on mobile phones.

Google's John Mueller said on Twitter that it is good practice to use a canonical attribute on your web pages: "Regardless of the framework it's a good practice to specify a rel=canonical, especially if you have preferences regarding the URL shown."

Editor's note: The website audit tool in SEOprofiler checks the canonical attributes on your web pages (and many more things).

Google's John Muellers said on Reddit that it usually doesn't make sense to use too many heading sections on a web page: "Assuming you have 3 sub-sections per section, that would be: 1xH1 (insert argument about number of H1s here) * 3xH2 * 3xH3 * 3xH4 * 3xH5 * 3xH6 = 243 headings / sections on this page. [...]

Having this many sections is almost never going to make sense, and changing anything in the last level is never going to change anything with regards to SEO."

"What started out as a simple alert panel has evolved into the most prolific set of direct information the Google SERP has ever seen. Google’s on-the-SERP coverage of COVID-19 isn’t only an easy-to-access beast of a data source, it’s also a peek at what could be coming to the SERP."

Google's John Mueller said on Twitter that you should only use hreflang tags when you have unique content in different pages: "I'd recommend limiting yourself to the number of regions you have unique, human-written, high-quality content for. Less is more."