Use Website Design Navigation to Boost Your Search Engine Optimization
Navigation and Internal Linking
Creating a website design navigation that’s well organized helps your site get indexed and ranked faster in addition to making navigation easier for your visitors. Designing your navigation items with CSS, JavaScript or JQuery instead of Flash will also help the search spiders find the pages faster. To top up the benefits of your navigation create interconnected internal links with the proper tag elements.
For effective website design navigation, the goal is to organize your internal website links so that they connects your pages together and are easy to find. What you want to avoid is having pages inaccessible for your website visitor to follow. You can accomplish this by creating a series of menus and links inside the content itself. In addition, make sure that you use link text on the menus that clearly show which page the link connects to and label each link for each page in a similar fashion.
However you need to be careful not to use the exact same anchor text for all of your links to avoid ‘SEO SPAM.’ And just what is SEO Spam? This term is defined by the search engines and include practices such as doorway and mirror pages. You can review the specifics for Yahoo and Google to be sure your website is in keeping with these standards.
How to Avoid Flash by using CSS Image Replacement
There are tremendous search engine benefits from using text in your website design navigation. In general it’s a good idea to use text as much as possible instead of Flash in every instance where you might be tempted to use text inside of an image. Where image usage cannot be avoided, the best alternative once again is based on CSS. The FIR (Fahrner Image Replacement) technique for replacing images with text that was first used in 2003 has evolved over the years. Now the preferred technique is the Scott Kellum Method. Using this technique along with the TITLE and ALT image tags will also increase the effectiveness of you search engine optimization when spiders crawl your website.