SEO considerations for Navigation Menus

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

Listen to this podcast

No Comments

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post
TrackBack URI

Leave a comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.