SEO & Navigation

A websites navigation is an important part of on site optimization. For SEO, any / all navigation should be coded as text, not images; these will become your most clicked on anchor text, and helps SE’s see what your categories are all about.

First, a few notes; avoid using AJAX, Javascript or Flash for your navigation. When you view the source of your page, you should see your links within the code – pulling that navigation (for example, with drop down navigation occasionally seen in e-commerce stores) from an outside file won’t help you.

For usability & SEO, do yourself a favor and put your navigation in the traditional places users would look – on the left or at the top. Google puts more weight on the content that appears at the top of a page, and the user is much more likely to stay on a page thats intuitive to navigate.

Please, at all costs, avoid Mystery Meat Navigation. Even worse, avoid not using any navigation and putting all your content on one page.

Now that you have your navigation designed, take a look at the site architecture and URL structure before coding.

Now that thats out of the way, Lets play “Guess where the navigation is?“