Search Engine Friendly Menu Systems

The navigation system employed in any website is central to the way that search engines and users will find information within your site. Many of the menu systems that have the nicest looking and contain the coolest effects may be impenetrable to search engines and may not display as expected to all web users.

Navigation and Search Engines

The links that develop into your navigation system are crucial to the search engine success of your site. These links form the major compenent for the internal links of the site. The pages that the navigation section points to should be the generic pages within the site. Below each of these generic pages the sections of the site should be developed thematically for maximum affect in the search engine rankings. Search engines like to find content that is linked from related content and that the links that point out reflect the content of that particular page and is partially related to the general theme of the website.

If your website does not have a coherent navigation system that reinforces the generic overview of the site. If your home page talks about subject X every page in your internal naigation system is liekly to be related to subject X. These related subjects are then likely to move downwards in a pyramidial fashion through related subjects from the related through to the specific. As all these pages will have a relevance to subject X and all the other main topics in your navigation will be related to subject X having these pages interlink will only benefit your search engine rankings.

If the search engines cannot follow these links, such as may the case in Javascript or Flash navigation, you will not be delivering the maximum benefit to your site in terms of search engine discovery of pages and the additional relevancy that internal links can bring.

Web Users and Navigation

when a user visits your site via a search engine theyt are looking for information related to the topic that they were searching for. If your page heading talks directly about the topic and then the navigation talks inclusively about related subjects the user psychologically knows that they are in the correct place. If I visit a site that talks about search engine optimisation and I see a link for an unrelated subject in aprominent place I wonder why it is there. Firstly are they selling links, are they advertising a clients site to aid their rankings or are they just spamming it up. For example if you have a look at Net Imperative, the navigation on the left links to numerous companies not all of which are on topic, it gets a little messy and confusing.

Designing a Menu System

When designing a menu system keep central ideas at the fore front of your mind are :

1. Is the menu spiderable?
2. Are the menu options listed logically?
3. Do the words used in the options lead to the relevance of the target pages?
4. Do the word articulate generic themes to users?

Please find below some search engine friendly menu systems we like :

• Platform Sales menu system that uses JavaScript and CSS for an effective spiderable menu, could do with some improvements in terms of making it more user friendly.
• Spiderwriting Web Design - Yep Bills made a menu based on CSS again
• IT Lab have a nice little drop down menu when you click on the top menu options. On the whole the menu is logically grouped by theme and aids users. Oh and we stole their typeface for out main heading at the top of the page. If you also want a cool effect see the way that certain tags within the site use javascript to include them in a flash movie that is completely spiderable.

List of Articles on Ethical Search Engine Optimization

: Hotel Industry Booking Study :: The Horror of Site Submit Pro :: What do you need from Your Site? :
: What is Page Rank? :: Page Rank is Dead - Myth or Reality :: The Replacement for Page Rank? :
: Latent Semantic Indexing :: Using Latent Semantic Indexing :: Robots.txt :
: Writing a robots.txt file :: Server Company Link Request :: Duplicate and Near Duplicate Content :
: Web Site Spiderability :: Big Daddy - the new face of Google :: Page Hijacking and 302 redirects :
: To Submit to Search Engines or not to Submit to Search Engines That is the Question? :: Know Your Customer to Know your User :: Black Hat SEO - Dont Do it! :
: April Fools in Search Engine Land :: Search Engines and Menus :: High Rankings - How do Search Engines fit into Your Business? :
: Google - Da Vinci Code the Game :: Removing the ODP description from your MSN listing :: Viewing the Google index from different Geographic Positions :
: Underused HTML Tags :: Company Law Amendment :

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