There’s some fantastic information in a recent article on WebDesignerDepot.  I was just discussing this concept with a  client the other day.  The subject at hand was “How do you get the most mileage out of your footer?”

The footer of your site is one of the most critical and overlooked parts of the site.  The article at WebDesignerDepot offers many good points from a design perspective but I prefer a good combination of SEO and user-centric features.  Examples like the White House and Apple are what most SEO firms will recommend.  They’ll tell you to make sure you have links there to all your important pages and make sure you load your keywords into them.  That’s all good for the search engines but don’t forget about the user.  Mail Chimp takes the space in the footer and uses it to repeat its sales pitch. Chances are, if someone has read all the way to the bottom of a page, they are predictably going to be more interested in what you are doing/selling on your website than people that never make it to the footer.  But Mail Chimp also loses some SEO value.  So which is the right strategy?

At this point I would say take a step back and look at your analytics.  What are your users doing with your current footer.  Maybe it’s time to try some A-B testing with your footer and see if adding the sales pitch without the links makes a difference in your conversion rate.  I’m betting it will.  But every website is different.  It could be that you lose a couple spots in your rankings and the difference in traffic isn’t worth the gain in conversion rate. But then again, maybe it will be.

There’s also pretty good odds that you are using social media in your marketing.  You are right? You should be.  Social media icons and links could fit very well into your footer strategy.  But again, consult your analytics and do some testing.

Above all, remember the first rule of SEO.  If it’s useful for real users, the search engines have figured it out or will figure it out. Eventually