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 Menus Contain Meaning
Site navigation information within menus can be a good clue to what a site is about. The rule of thumb is that you should avoid buzzwords and special terms in your navigation menu, unless you know for sure what you are doing and what audience you target. When menus are keyword compatible, they're fairly clear and concise. Commonly, they utilize 2 to 10 graphic buttons leading to all the key pages on the site. When a search engine spider reads such a menu, it's able to quickly and easily figure out what your site is about and which pages are most important. As a rule, you put links to other pages of your site in the navigation menu. The search engine can analyze what the links to those pages say. They do that by reading what's within the text hyperlink or the alt text tag or they read the words around the hyperlink itself. They'll even include title tags and associate them with the link.
For instance, if you have a text menu on every page with your first menu link reading "About us", it's probably not something you want to rank high for. Actually, you won't rank well at all, because there are millions of Web sites competing for that keyword phrase. It's the same for the old standard “home” button. In terms of search engine optimization, it is a waste of search engine ranking power. Not only are you positioning your Web site for the phrase "about us", you're also taking away the linking power from the really important pages on your Web site. A link that reads "About MyCompanyNameHere" will be a much smarter substitution. The ideal case is when you have your primary keyword in the company name, e.g. "Widgets International". You should consider how many links you have going out from the home page via your menus. Along with the external link structure of the World Wide Web, the internal link system of your site is crucial for your rankings too. It is not enough to write a Web page using the correct keywords. There needs to be keywords in other Web pages pointing to your page(s) for it to rank well. No Web page is an isolated entity. It draws its meaning and relevance based on links. Use your links with precision and purpose. Link Menu Keyword Themes Since site menu links are so prominent and weighty on a page, you should consider creating an internal keyword theme (also called keyword profile) for your site. Keywords themes are investigated in more detail later on this course; for now, it's enough to know that search engine spiders would collect all the visible words (anchor text) from all the links to a certain page and these words will make your keyword theme. If the spider is able to detect that certain keywords are used with certain regularity across your keyword theme, your rank will get a boost for these. Following is a sample menu for WeatherScreen (a weather forecast software): - Weather forecast software
- Desktop weather forecast
- Desktop weather maps
- Daily horoscopes
- Biorhythm calculator
- Long-range weather forecast
If we use this menu across all pages of our Web site, chances are the site will be considered strong for "weather", "forecast", "desktop" and "software" – provided, of course, that the keyword distribution across these pages is properly adjusted. The beauty of this simple approach to menus is that both users and search engines can see that this particular page has something to do with weather forecast. There may be occasions, of course, when using a keyword theme for menus may not be the desired choice. Such decisions are dictated for site-specific reasons. If this is the case, you can use technology that spiders ignore to build you're your main menu – e.g. JavaScript or Flash. Make sure to provide an additional tiny menu in the end of the page to give the search engine the right message and allow it to visit and index all your pages. It is wise to use your keywords within this menu for best results. You should also have text links in your body copy of the page. Text menu links placed at the top or bottom of the page usually look like this: Weather forecast software | Desktop weather forecast | Daily horoscopes | Biorhythms Graphical navigation buttons Navigation buttons are graphic images (such as .gif or .jpg) that link to a URL. These buttons are often used by designers to create a site's navigation menu or site map because they can be more visually pleasing than text links. Search engines can generally follow a link surrounding a navigation button, provided it does not contain JavaScript. Navigation buttons using a mouse rollover effect are often not search engine friendly because they contain JavaScript. If you have an all graphics page, you'll need to attach simple hyperlinks to the graphic buttons and use the html tag called the alt tag. This technique is not as good as a text link but if it's all you're allowed, use it. It's usually better than nothing at all. Image map menus Image maps are a single graphic that contains separate hyperlinked areas leading to different pages of a website or to different sections on the same page. Shari Thurow, the author of "Search Engine Visibility" and an SEO expert, explains why image maps affect a site's search engine compatibility: Many search engines do not follow the links inside an image map because of the possibility of image spam. Thus, if you choose to use an image map as part of your site's navigation scheme, always use text links elsewhere on your web pages
(Find out more about the book "Search engine visibility": http://www.searchenginesbook.com/) Drop Down Menus If you use drop-down menus on your pages, be sure to include actual HTML links to your pages as well. If you rely on your drop-down menus to direct the spiders to other pages on your site, those pages will probably not be indexed. Since drop-down menus usually use some kind of JavaScript to operate – particularly when you are redirected to a certain page immediately upon selecting the menu item – they are not indexable. However, if you choose a menu item and then click some button to go to the selected page, chances are that your dropdown menu is clean from JavaScript code and can be of use for optimization. Try to put keywords as inner HTML content of your <OPTION> tags: <select name="navigation"> <option value="about.htm"> About Weather Screen </option> <option value="horoscopes.htm"> Daily horoscopes </option> </select> In any case, as a safety net, be sure to use a simple text link menu somewhere on the top or bottom part of your page. An alternative is to create a good site map which is clearly linked to from the main page. Menu placement If you use a vertical navigation menu, the best position for it in terms of SEO will be on the right side of the page. Doing so moves your textual content closer to the beginning, making it more accessible to the search engine spiders. If you need to place your menu on the left side of the page, let the spider first pass to your content and then read the menu. You can accomplish this by providing an empty cell which will open the first row (see the previous lesson on HTML tables). It's a common and useful practice to place a text link menu in a row on the top of the page or in the bottom section. If you use your keywords and don't forget about the keyword theme, these links will have their say when the spider comes to index.
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