Site Navigation which is best
Your site navigation is one of the most important parts of your website, in terms of SEO and usability. This is an SEO blog but I will briefly touch on usability. Bad navigation, from a users perspective, is when your navigation leads to pages where there is no way to go forward or backward. A number of pages quickly maintaining the consistency of your navigational layout is therefore important, on every page and all pages should have a link going back to the home page. Right then, down to business, in regards to navigation and SEO this is important on two fronts; firstly, the flow of PageRank thoughout your site. All links on your site pass on PageRank. Therefore, the link in your primary navigation should be tailored to your important pages. By having something like your privacy statement in your primary navigation is a bad idea, as this will have PageRank flowing to it from every page in your site. Secondly, is how you create your navigation:
Option One: Flash navigation. Although it might look nice, it is a major problem to the search engine in terms of reading the link. Therefore, many pages will not get spidered easily and PageRank will not flow through your site properly.
Option Two: Javascript navigation. This is also a no no, as the fragment of Javascript code in relation to the URL can, and often does, confuse the spider in where the destination is located.
Option Three: Table based navigation. This is better than the last two, but if your navigation cleverly contains your keyword, it can be misinterpreted as spam and it is not the easiest option for the search engines to crawl.
Option Four: CSS lists. Lists are the Google preferred type of navigation and allows for the search engines to quickly spider your link. Also, because it is a list, it will never be considered spam. With todays advances in CSS, I can safely say that there is not much that you can’t do in CSS, which can be done in both Flash and Java Script.
So there you have it, CSS lists are the best type of navigation of any website. Now, I just wish that every one else would just come to realise it.
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