Site Navigation Back to Article Site Navigation is a sticky subject as it generally causes a rift to develop between webmasters and the site designers. The designers will want navigation schemes that involve graphical buttons and JavaScript or Flash menus. Unfortunately those types of navigation schemes can have a negative impact on the search index ranking of your pages. Search engines cannot "see" the text on your graphical buttons. It is good practice to make use of text links for all of your important navigational links. Try to keep the links specific and use keywords when possible. If you must use a graphical link, be sure to include a good description of the purpose of the image in both the alt and title arguments for that image and provide that same link somewhere on the page as a text link. For example if you use a graphic for a navigational link to your products page you would want to use a link similar to the one below... <a href="products.html"><img src="products.jpg" width="25" height="15" border="0" alt="Product List" title="View a list of our products"></a> Then be sure to include a text link to the same location on the page, usually at the bottom of the page. JavaScript menus and Flash menus, while providing a slick look and feel, cannot be seen by most search engines spiders or bots and will be ignored. Any links, keywords or content inside the script will be rendered useless in your attempts to get indexed on most search engines. As mentioned before, try to use text links whenever possible. To get a good idea about how a search engine spider sees your pages, use the Lynx Viewer here http://www.rankquest.com/tools/Lynx-View.php. By studying the results, you can get a better feel for what the spiders and bots are seeing and determine how to better optimize the page to make the best use of your keywords. A good compromise between the site designers and webmasters is to use CSS menus inside a <div> as an alternative to JavaScript or Flash menus. These can be seen by visiting search engines while still giving much of the functionality the site designers want. |
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