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Ensuring effective links to, from and around your site is crucial to your search engine position. If your content is great but people and the search engines can't get to your site then move around it you will not get the right results.
A navigation scheme is the method people use to get around your site. The text links, image links, and other links. Getting this right is crucial to both your viewers experience and the search engines rating of your site. There are several factors that need to be considered. Things that can help the viewer can hinder the Search Engine Spiders.
An alternative navigation scheme is often a clever way of helping the search engines. Providing simple text only links at the bottom of the page can help the spiders move around your site and also enable you to have image buttons and flash content.
Things to consider with your navigation scheme:
Text Links - These are the simplest types of links. They contain just the text to display and the web address to link to. These are the types that the search engines most like. The words in the text displayed are also very useful for putting keywords. They can appear boring though to viewers.
Dynamically created links - These are very common with more advanced web design such as ASP.NET. We use them here. They can be text links, image links etc. If they are just text then they will appear to the search engines as such. However if they have a ? or similar character in the web address the spiders can have trouble, most allow one but frown on overuse of the ? as it can be a hint at a spam website.
Frames - This is a way of laying out of the website. Links are more troublesome with Frames as only parts of the page actually change and search engines often only display the one part of the page in the results. On the sister site websitedesigntips.co.uk we advise not to use Frames. Here is another reason.
Javascript - Search engines can have trouble if javascript is used for buttons. rollover effects for example. Understanding the code might not work with the spiders so if you use these type of effects which viewers do like think strongly about an alternative navigation scheme.
Flash - Again these can be very visually appealing websites. However as they require a plug-in to the browser search engines can struggle with them. You want people to like your site and if this is aided by Flash then think about providing an alternative navigation scheme. The spiders are and will continue to get better with Flash but being careful is probably still wise.
Image Maps - These are visually effective, especially with maps. However again can be hard to follow and therefore consider using the alternative navigation scheme. |