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Jan
26
2012
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Posted 113 days ago ago by Douglas C.
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Website menu solutions have been around since the dawn of the web. Supplying user friendly navigation for your site visitors is a crucial part of your website design. Through the years there have been many advancements with regards to website navigation solutions however some of these have actually had a negative impact with regards to SEO because they have made it tougher for search engines to efficiently crawl your website.
Among the most widely used menu system types are the simple html menu (1 level only), horizontal drop down menu, vertical menu (aka: side navigation), tabbed navigation and floating navigation. Each type of navigation has its own set of pros and cons. Figuring out which style is most suitable for a certain website is based upon on the overall website design and the structure of the site.
There are also many distinct technologies necessary to support these various menu system types such as standard HTML, CSS (cascading style sheets), Javascript, jQuery and Flash. From an SEO perspective, building your navigation with simple HTML and CSS is the safest option. However with the debute of jQuery into the mix, many of the impressive effects only available with Javascript can now be applied to a standard HTML unordered list, which happens to be highly SEO-friendly. As far as Flash goes, there are a few ways to get your navigation menu to be moderately SEO friendly, but the bottom line is that flash navigation should be prevented if SEO is a top concern.
The last consideration that remains is where should the navigation be positioned? The obvious main 2 standards are along the top and the left side. However many blog sites have their navigation located to the right side. There are also a number of sites that use a mixture of both. For example, their top navigation represents the 1st level of their site and the sub navigation is presented in the form of left or right nav.
With all this in mind, the decision to use a very simple html menu system over a more sophisticated jQuery menu system really comes down to the amount of time you are willing to devote towards the creation of your navigation. jQuery is an awesome new technology, but defintely has a significant learning curve. If you do prefer a more advanced navigation system and don't have practical knowledge with jQuery, it's most effective to utilize an online jquery menu bulider. This way, you get the added benefits of having a very SEO-freindly navigation system and the exceptional user experience provided by jQuery's functionality.