Creating SEO-Friendly Navigation
One of the basics things to take care of when optimizing your blog for search engines would be navigation. It’s essentially a founding principle in good search engine optimization, but how do we really utilize our websites’ navigation for SEO?
Before we go any further, let us discuss how does navigation help with SEO in the first place. The key to good search engine optimization is getting search engine bots to crawl your data, and good navivation SEO means that navigation links are not going to be a hindrance for bots from going deep into your site.
You’d know if your site has a less-than desirable navigation if you see:
- The drop downs stop working when JavaScript is disabled
- Header links are image based instead of text-based
- If you opt to disable CSS and JavaScript, internal links disappear.
- Internal links when you check your website via Google Cache
You see all those problems in the first place because navigation was set up incorrectly, thus hindering search engines from crawling your sites properly. This is going to hurt you in the long run, because that important page you need to get crawled by search engines may get missed, and who knows how much traffic that mistake cost you.
How do we prevent this from happening?
If we go to websites and check out their navigation, you might notice some sites have those fancy-pants drop down menus using JavaScript, or worse, Flash menus. Avoid this.
Here’s a rule of thumb I follow: if you disable JavaScript and CSS from your site, you should still be able to navigate through it as easily as possible. You see, search engines such as Google and Bing don’t see JavaScript and Flash the way we do. They only see the site the same way we do if we disable JavaScript and CSS - just a huge white page filled with all sorts of text and links. This is why we need to keep HTML as simple as possible, and keep the navigation as an unordered list of links, like so:
- Home
- Services
- Pricing
- Contact Us
Okay, I know that Google is creating ways to be able to crawl content inside JavaScript and Flash, but frankly it’s all experimental at this point and we can’t really trust the technology to do what it’s supposed to do. Besides, Bing and Yahoo don’t have support for that yet, so relying on JavaScript and Flash navigation is not a smart move.
In case you really, really need to use drop-down navigation links - let’s say you have 20 categories, and it really won’t look pretty if you put them all on one part of the page - you don’t have to use JavaScript. There’s the CSS option. A CSS dropdown doesn’t come with the usability problems associated with JavaScropt dropdowns, and they look much, much prettier if you ask me.
Aside from solving usability and design problems, optimizing your navigation is a major boon for your search engine optimization. What other techniques have you used for your navigation?
Vic Carrara
Masterwebsoftware.com
© 2010 Vic Carrara & MasterWebSoftware.com - All Rights Reserved