Site Navigation for SEM

Building a Menu System

A website should be designed in such a way that makes it easy for both users and search engine robots to move around the site and allow access to all material contained within the site.  In most cases navigating a site is handled via a menu system that includes links to important internal content areas.  Some sites, particularly sites with a relatively small number of pages, provide access to nearly all internal pages through a single main menu.  Alternatively, sites with many content areas often follow a hierarchical or drill-down design where there is a main menu containing links to important areas and then once in an area users are presented with a menu of links to further sub-areas.  In some cases sub-areas may contain even more menus.

When designing a menu system, marketers should take the following into consideration:

• Design for Users But Within SE Marketing Parameters - Menu systems should first and foremost, be built for site visitors and be both intuitive (contains what a visitor expects it to contain and allows visitors to get where they want to go) and consistent (follows similar pattern and design from one page to another).  However, as we will soon discuss, marketers should be cognizant of the potential obstacles menu designs present to search engines crawlers.  So while a menu should be built for the website’s targeted audience it should be done with an understanding of how search engines see the menu.
• Text Menus May Be Better Than Dynamic Menus – A common method used by websites to expose users to many links within a menu is to use dynamically scripted menus.  Many sites use menus built using JavaScript, a special Internet scripting language that allows menus to be presented in many interesting ways including expanding when a user clicks or runs their mouse over a particular menu item.  Unfortunately, JavaScript can pose a problem for search robots which may have difficulty following the links.  As Google notes in its recommendations for Webmasters,  website operators should be careful when using JavaScript and they recommend that every important content item should also be linked with at least one text link.  A text link is a traditional HMTL link just as we used above to link to Google’s site.  So while the use of dynamic menus can enhance user’s experience with a site, it is important to offer a secondary method for accessing pages via text links (see Sitemap below).
• Text Menus May Be Better Than Image Menus – One additional bit of caution deals with menus created using images.  As we discussed in previous tutorials, search engines are quite adept at recognizing content produced as text but often fall short at recognizing images.  Many sites use a menu system built on linked images and not linked text.  For instance, a menu may show an image containing the words “Our Products” that when clicked on takes a user to the marketer’s product page.  Yet search engines do not view this as text.  We will discuss the importance of this in greater detail in a later tutorial, but for now understand that search engines not only follow links but they also attempt to gain understanding about the link.  In this example, a search engine attempts to understand what the link is pointing to (a product page).  While this is easily done with text links it is more difficult with image links.  If image links need to be used, the marketer should understand the importance of the ALT tag that is associated with the image link.  Better yet, create menus that are text menus but use images as background and not as links.