What good is a website if users can’t get from page to page? Even worse, what if search engines can’t get from page to page? It’s useless, and that’s the last thing you want. Essentially, if you want your website to be usable by everyday people, then it needs to be navigable by computers, and here are a few steps to do just that.
No Flash
Navigation should catch the user’s attention. It should pop out to your visitor saying “use me to get to were you want to go!” When I first graduated from design school and decided to create a portfolio, I had to address this very issue. My solution at the time? Flash!
Animations, rollovers, even fonts of my choice — great, huh? No. Flash is not readable by all search engines. Although Google has been improving its flash crawling abilities, flash movies are not structured in such a way that you can control the flow properly. Especially when SEO is concerned, do not use Flash.
No flash, how about JavaScript?
In the past few months, we have noticed an increase of JavaScript navigation being spidered by Google. This may be due, in part, to the fact that Google supposedly renders pages using Firefox’s and then crawls links. However, this is still not a sure bet that your text will be rendered and followed as intended, especially if you are using JavaScript to hide and display certain portions of a site’s navigation. We’ve found that JavaScript navigation menus just don’t index as well as HTML/CSS Google (and all other search engines). This brings me to an important point.
Google is not everything in the search world
Yahoo and MSN both have decent presences in internet search, as do Ask and many others. Would you cut out 40% of your user-base just to have a cool looking animation in your navigation? How about make your website fail accessibility standards? As I have mentioned before in my post about building links, it is important to follow accessibility standards both for the integrity of the site and SEO marketing. If you build your website so that a screen reader can use and navigate it, then a search engine will have no problem.
Image buttons in your navigation
If you must use image buttons in your navigation, be sure to give anchor tags proper titles. Also, I recommend putting text inside each of those anchor tags that resembles the text in the image. You can do this, and hide it using CSS. Wrap your content in a <span> with a style=”display:none;” as shown below.
<a href="#" title="About us!"><span style="display:none;">about page</span></a>
While this will work, it would be best to make a CSS class and just add the class to you span. This method will ensure that the text is rendered only when CSS is turned off, and give spiders something to read when they crawl the page.
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