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Apr
05
2010
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Posted 2 years 44 days ago ago by Douglas C.
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Html menu systems have been around for as long as the web has existed. Providing easy to use navigation for your site visitors is an essential part of any website design. Over the years there have been many advances with regards to website navigation and some of these have actually had negative results in terms of Search Engine Optimization because they have made it more difficult for search engines to easily crawl your website.
Among the most popular menu system types are text html menu (1 level only), horizontal Drop down html menu, vertical html menu (aka: side navigation), tabbed navigation and floating navigation. Each type of navigation has its own set of pros and cons. Determine which types is best for a particular website is dependent on the over site design and the hierarchy of the site.
There are also many different technologies involved to accommodate these html menu system types such as standard HTML, CSS (cascading style sheets), Javascript, jQuery and Flash. From an SEO perspective, building your navigation with HTML and CSS is the safest option. However with the introduction of jQuery to the mix, many of the cool effect only achievable with Javascript can now be applied to a standard HTML unordered list, which happens to be extremely SEO-friendly. As far as Flash goes, there are some ways to get it to be somewhat SEO friendly, but the bottom line is that flash navigation should be avoided if SEO is a top concern.
The last consideration that remains is where should the navigation be located? The obvious top 2 standard are along the top and the left side. However many blog site have moved their vertical navigation to the right. there are also many sites that use a mix of both. For example, their top navigation represent their 1 level of their site and the sub navigation is presented in the form of left or right nav.
