If you’re an ecommerce site looking to improve your organic visibility dramatically with one simple move, a highly-effective SEO tactic is the optimization of your global navigation.
In my experience, I’ve seen significant movement on the SERPs after adding target keywords thoughtfully to the global navigation.
Global navigation SEO ensures search engines understand the site’s most-important topics and categories. Think of the navigation as the marquee above a Broadway show; highlighting the big name stars of your website.
By strategically linking out from the global navigation using your target keywords as the anchor text, the assumption by the search engines is that if these categories and topics are important enough to be in the global navigation — at the top of page, above the fold, accessible throughout the entire site — that category must be an important section of the site.
If internal linking is a key SEO factor, the optimization of the global navigation is the mother of all internal links. Not only are they located in prime real estate, but those links appear on every page of your site where the navigation exists.
Here’s a couple great guides to doing navigation SEO from Distilled and Search Engine Journal.