Menu Navigation SEO

Whether your menu navigation bar is placed to the top, or to the left on your web page, it is the most important thing to get right, but yet so easily the thing that’s got wrong. Let people easily find your content by providing a simple and effective navigation designed to help visitors find your content rather than inhibit them.

Main Navigation

The main navigation is typically placed either to the top of a web page or to the left, which is where visitors expect to see it. Anywhere other than this, and you’re just going to confuse people straight off the bat, which isn’t a good thing. Also, it is there for one purpose only and that is to help visitors find the content they are searching for as quickly and as easy as possible. If it doesn’t do this, then your menu navigation isn’t doing its job right.

The Best Approach

With some early thought as to how you are going to structure your menu hierarchy and content pages, then your main menu navigation SEO should be straight-forward. If you have multiple sub-categories, then use a list-based Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) style to produce a drop-down menu. This allows you to use a text-based navigation system that incorporates your keywords making them easily indexed by search engines. With every change to your menu, always check to ensure there are no broken links.

Navigation to Avoid

Try not to use Flash or JavaScript to display your main navigation as search engines will not be able to read the embedded links within. If you do have to use one of these application, then ensure you also have a text-based navigation system for your users to use and search engines to index. This could be a breadcrumb navigation, or a footer navigation. If you do use Footer navigation, be sure to check out our Footer Links SEO article. Also avoid nice-looking image-based navigation for the same reason. A much better approach is to use your graphic as a background image with your anchor text styled with CSS. Whenever you do use images for links, always include alternative text for your link with Alt Tag SEO.

Breadcrumb Navigation

Breadcrumb navigation is an excellent way to help visitors find their way around your website, especially if you have many sub-categories and many pages of content. Each category and sub-category is represented as a link with their page name as the anchor text. If you design your categories around your keywords, then this results in a keyword-rich menu system. For this page, the breadcrumb navigation would therefore be:
free seo expert > sem > seo > on-page optimising > menu navigation
This allows visitors to easily navigate your menu hierarchy and it is an excellent opportunity to promote all your keywords associated with this particular page.