Search Engine Friendly Navigation

Check your site's navigation

Search engines find the interior pages of a website by following the links in the site navigation. If they can’t detect the navigation on your site it's very likely only your home page will be indexed in search engines. None of the information on the other pages of your site will be searchable.

Test for flash navigation

Here’s how you can tell if you have a Flash animation. When you right click your mouse over the main navigation of your site, do you get a menu with “About Adobe Flash Player” at the bottom? That’s Flash. Some search engines can follow flash links and some can’t, but why make it hard? Just add some supplemental text navigation.

If you do have Flash navigation you probably have drop-down menus that open as you mouse over them. When you go into an interior page, is there supplemental text navigation for people to move from one page to another within a category? If they have to go back up to the main navigation to move to another page within that section, you also need supplemental text navigation within each category that lists all the pages in that section. Remember, search engines can’t reliably read links in a Flash navigation.

Test for image navigation

Image navigations are usually okay, but not ideal for search engines. You can tell you have an image navigation if you see an option to copy the image when you left click over a link in the navigation. You can't go wrong adding some supplemental text navigation if search engines are not indexing your pages.

Image navigations are not ideal
for search engines because they can’t read words saved as a graphic image. The section on search words on a web page explains how the wording in links is important. If search engines can’t read the words in your links, you lose this opportunity for promotion. 

Test for text navigation

If you can copy and paste the text in your navigation into a document, you’ve got text navigation. This is great for search engines. The text may have an image behind it that changes when you mouse-over the link. This is perfectly fine. It’s still a text link. No supplemental text navigation should be necessary. In rare cases you may have a text navigation with JavaScript links that can't be followed by search engines.

If you have JavaScript links in your navigation instead of HTML links, that will cause a problem for search engines. There is no easy way to check this without getting into the code. If you have some familiarity with HTML, take a look at your page source and make sure the links have href=”filename”. Here’s an example:

You may see additional code in the link like id=”something” or class=”something”. This is fine. You might also see target=”blank”. Also fine. What you don’t want to see is “window.open” or navigation links in a JavaScript function like this:

If you aren’t familiar enough with HTML code to check for this on your own, ask your web designer what type of navigation you have. You might ask them if they could send you a sample of the code for one link, just so you can see for yourself the link has href=”filename”. If you are not clear exactly what to ask, or how to interpret their answer, just send them a link to this page. That should clarify what you are asking and why.