Lesson (13): Optimizing Navigation and Menus

Menus Contain Meaning

Site navigation information within menus can be a good clue to what a site is about. The rule of thumb is that you should avoid buzzwords and special terms in your navigation menu, unless you know for sure what you are doing and your target audience.

When menus are keyword compatible they’re fairly clear and concise. Commonly, they utilize 2 to 10 graphic buttons leading to all the key pages on the site. When a search engine spider reads such a menu, it’s able to quickly and easily figure out what your site is about and which pages are most important. As a rule, you put links to other pages of your site in the navigation menu. The search engine can analyze what the links to those pages say. They do that by reading what’s within the text hyperlink or the alt text tag or they read the words around the hyperlink itself. They’ll even include title tags and associate them with the link.

For instance, if you have a text menu on every page with your first menu link reading “About us”, it’s probably not something you want to rank high. Actually, you won’t rank well at all, because there are millions of websites competing for that keyword phrase. It’s the same for the old standard “home” button. In terms of search engine optimization, it is a waste of search engine ranking power. You are not only positioning your website for the phrase “about us”, you’re also taking away the linking power from the really important pages on your website. A link that reads “About MyCompanyNameHere” will be a much smarter substitution. The ideal case is when you have your primary keyword in the company name, e.g. “Widgets International”.

Consider how many links you have outgoing from the home page via your menus. Along with the external link structure of the World Wide Web, the internal link system of your site is also crucial for your rankings.

It is not enough to write a Web page using the correct keywords. There needs to be keywords in other Web pages pointing to your page(s) for it to rank well. No Web page is an isolated entity. It draws its meaning and relevance based on links. Use your links with precision and purpose.

Link Menu Keyword Themes

Since site menu links are so prominent and weighty on a page, consider creating an internal keyword theme (also called keyword profile) for your site. Keywords themes are discussed in more detail later on in this course; for now, it’s enough to know that search engine spiders collect all the visible words (anchor text) from all the links to a certain page and these words will make up your keyword theme. If the spider is able to detect that certain keywords are used with certain regularity across your keyword theme, your rank will get a boost for these.

Following is a sample menu for WeatherScreen (weather forecasting software):

* Weather forecast software
* Desktop weather forecast
* Desktop weather maps
* Daily horoscopes
* Biorhythm calculator
* Long-range weather forecast

If we use this menu across all pages of our website, chances are the site will be considered strong for “weather”, “forecast”, “desktop” and “software” – provided, of course, that the keyword distribution across these pages is properly adjusted.

The beauty of this simple approach to menus is that both users and search engines can see that this particular page has something to do with weather forecasting.

There may be occasions, of course, when using a keyword theme for menus may not be the desired idea. Such decisions are dictated by site-specific needs. If this is the case, you can use technology that spiders ignore to build your main menu – e.g. JavaScript or Flash. Make sure to provide an additional tiny menu at the end of the page to give the search engine the right message and allow it to visit and index all your pages. It is wise to use your keywords within this menu for best results.

You should also have text links in your body copy of the page.

Text menu links placed at the top or bottom of the page usually look like this:

Weather forecast software | Desktop weather forecast | Daily horoscopes | Biorhythms