Website Navigation and Menus

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.

Drop Down Menus

If you use drop-down menus on your pages, be sure to include actual HTML links to your pages as well!

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 tags.

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.