Navigation Menu's
04 Feb 2010 06:04 am
A Navigation Menu in SEO can play a huge role in optimizing your website for search engines. The reason being is when a search engine crawls your website, it is going to read everything in the header and the first 100 or so keywords in your body which would usually be your article..
In this lesson we are going to discuss using targeted keywords, using text, why not to use image or flash, and why css is your best bet when it comes to header, footer and other navigation menu’s / bar’s.
Using targeted keywords in navigation menu’s
I am sure you have seen websites which use flash or image navigation menu’s in their headers. If you are trying to optimize your web site, this is a major SEO Mistake which has been added to the SEO Black book on here as reference.
The reason this is a no-no when it comes to SEO is because, search engine crawlers are not human, no matter how much you may want them to be. They cannot read images and flash. This is where using a CSS menu comes in handy. The reason this will come in handy is because you can spice up your navigation menu with awesome looking graphics and effects but at the same time you will use text to overlap every item on the menu. When designing a menu and adding categories and items, you want to use keywords that you are trying to rank for in search engines. We are going to discuss more of this below.
Using targeted keywords in your navigation menu’s
This will play a crucial role in your site ranking for keywords that you are targeting. In a normal menu you will see it categorized like this for example:
Home | News | Forum | Reviews | Tips | Tutorials
These are just general keywords. Now let’s say you have an SEO site like www.therantandrave.net and you are optimizing for SEO Keywords. When getting a site off of it’s feet, you want to use keywords in your menu until you start ranking for main keywords that you are aiming for. For example below.You would want your menu to resemble something like this:
Home | SEO Tips | SEO Tutorials | SEO Forum | SEO Tools
Now that you have a hint, these are keywords that I am trying to rank better for (SEO Tips, SEO Tutorials, SEO Forum, SEO Tools). As you can see in the top header navigation menu on our site therantandrave.net and on this site, our menu’s are in CSS. If you use wordpress, almost every wordpress theme comes with CSS menu’s which saves you a lot of work.
Notice that the keyword “seo” is used in each phrase. It is alright to use it in there like so when a site is getting off of it’s feet. Once you start ranking for the keyword “SEO” in this case, you then can change it up to just tutorials,forum,tools , for the search engine will start grabbing the information seo tutorials, seo tools in the future especially if you are building pages are given keywords.
Your best bet is using text/css navigation menu’s in your header, sidebar’s and footer using targeted keywords.
SEO Navigation Menu
