How to make a SEO friendly navigation bar

How do you make sure your navigation bar is optimised as much as possible without making it look it spammy?

The navigation menus are created to allow both the user and search engine spider to go through the different areas of the website. The navigation bar plays a plays crucial role in directing spiders to the site’s most important content and encouraging site visitors to visit the deeper levels of the site.

Here are five ways:

1. Avoid flash and JavaScript

Search engine spiders cannot crawl JavaScript generated menus, nor can they crawl Flash menus or Flash websites. They can crawl anchor text links, image links and image maps. Therefore all navigation should be in plain text or HTML and if any of the non crawl-able methods are used, alternative methods should be provided to allow search engine spiders to crawl and index the site. As there is a drop down menu, these should be built with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

2. Easy to access areas

The navigation bar should be easy to use and help visits find all relevant areas of the site. Do not overcomplicate things with keyword stuffed navigation drop down menus.

The ideal method is to embed the keyword phrases in the site navigation using plain hypertext anchor links. If image links are used, the ALT attribute should contain the keyword phrase. Google advises on using simple text links instead of relying only on complex navigation, drop-down menus or image navigation. Text links are indexed more easily by search engines.

3. Be consistent

Navigational links should be consistent throughout every page on the website. They should be in the same location with the same font, style and title. This helps users to find

4. Breadcrumbs

Use “breadcrumb” navigation. A breadcrumb is a row of internal links at the top or bottom of the page that allows visitors to navigate back quickly to a previous section or the root page. Many breadcrumbs have the most general page or root page as the first, left-most link and list the more specific sections to the right.

5. Keep it simple

It is important that the navigation is clean and there is no flash. It is not clear if the rotating images in the screen grabs are made out of flash. The number of clicks needed to access the key content pages should be kept to a minimum.

So there you go, a few pointers to get you on your way, so start building that site!

Is AJAX seo friendy?

When building a website, there is often conflict between the SEO consultant, developer and the designer.

The designer wants the site to look pretty, which is of course what we all want, but it sometimes affects SEO. For example, a site designed in flash may look good, but it cannot be read by spiders and can therefore not be indexed. This means it is harder for the site to appear high up in the search results.

There is also conflict with web developers. They may build the site in AJAX and Javascript which is great for a usability point of view, it is fast and unlike flash you do not need a third party application to run. However, it does nothing for SEO. A good example of a page using AJAX is gmail, when you click on compose message, the new message appears, but the rest of the site remains the same.

There are a few issues with AJAX.

- the search engine cannot see the content within AJAX and Javascript and therefore cannot index it
- the spider is unable to crawl the site
– cannot use the back/next/reload buttons properly
- all the pages load under the same URL

AJAX can be SEO friendly by following these best practice guidelines:

- Make the majority part of the site based in HTML, including the important navigation links.
- Put all the rich content and keywords in this part of the site – not on a dynamic page.
- Put a URL for each page you want to get crawled and indexed
- Make sure you cache dynamic pages and serve them as static ones
- All links and menu items the important parts of the site should work without AJAX and/or JavaScript – browsers allow you to disable javascript

Google is also proposing a new standard for making AJAX based websites search engine friendly. Google says:

“We’re excited to propose a new standard for making AJAX-based Web sites crawlable. This will benefit Webmasters and users by making content from rich and interactive AJAX-based Web sites universally accessible through search results on any search engine that chooses to take part. We believe that making this content available for crawling and indexing could significantly improve the Web”

When this is expected to happen is not yet known, but it does mean that if it is adopted, developers no longer have to choose between site optimization and dynamic pages.

If you have experience in optimising sites for SEO which use AJAX, then let me know.

For more information about AJAX and SEO, please refer to searchenginejournal