SEO considerations for Navigation Menus - November 30th, 2006

Browsing through a pick of your favourite websites, you will find that different sites employ many different methods for displaying navigation menus to their visitors.

Some of these can look very visually pleasing, especially those that employ Flash technology, or clever JavaScript techniques.

However, the menu system is one of the key aspects of your website, as it allows visitors, but more importantly the Search Engines, to find your deeper pages. So as search engines tend not to consider Flash and JavaScript page portions, it is accepted good SEO practice to avoid these.

One way of making a pretty menu without these technologies, is to construct it with graphics, JPEG and GIF images for example.

This again can throw up it’s own issues though. If you create a fancy button in Photoshop, or a similar package, containing the phrase “my page name” in your preferred font, your button may look fancy, but search engines will not recognise it for the phrase, as it is a graphic!

In general, it is best to use graphics to form the backgrounds of buttons and menus, but to overlay them with text for the actual link text.

For rollovers and drop down / interactive menus, create the menu portions using CSS, then add a simple JavaScript to show / hide the menu on rollover of the menu item

Remember though, do not use JavaScript to draw the menu, i.e. with a document.write or similar command, as the search spiders will not recognise it if you do!

Always check your site validates to the relevant W3C standards, and that it works in a plethora of different web browsers, particularly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, the two most widely used browsers.

Mike Irving
Web Developer

Just Search SEO

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Why Doorway pages are a bad idea - November 29th, 2006

Doorway pages are HTML pages that have been heavily loaded with particular keywords. They are easy to spot as they have been primarily designed to be viewed by search engine spiders not people (not readable), and they generally only contain links to external sites. Their purpose is to trick the search engines into giving them higher rankings; therefore giving the ‘real’ site they link to more web presence.

When a user searches for a particular keyword this doorway page will appear high in the natural listings, once on the doorway page they will then re-directed to the ‘real’ website. This idea is bad practice, and although you will see short-term results in the long run they can lead to your site getting penalised, search engine spiders are becoming more advanced and it’s only an amount of time until your doorway page is spotted.

Many SEO companies will create these doorway pages for you at potentially high costs, this is a considered an unethical approach and can lead to a Google ban.
Here at Just Search we pride ourselves on ethical search engine optimisation techniques, using thoughtfully placed keywords, well-written content and optimised Meta structures. This ensures your site is fully optimised, whilst reducing the pointless clutter that appears in the search engine results.

Paul Spreadbury
SEO Programmer

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