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Jan
29
2012
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Posted 109 days ago ago by Douglas C.
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Website menu solutions have been around since the dawn of the world wide web. Delivering simple point and click navigation for your site visitors is a vital part of any website design. Through the years there have been many advances relevant to website navigation technologies and surprisingly some of these have actually had negative results regarding Web optimization because they have made it more difficult 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 style of navigation has its own set of positives and negatives. Deciding which type is most suitable for a certain website is dependent on the overall website design and the structure of the site.
There are also several technologies needed 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 arrival of jQuery into the mix, many of the fantastic effects only doable with Javascript can now be applied to a standard HTML unordered list, which has always been truly 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 aspect to consider 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 particular navigation located to the right side. There are also a number of sites that use a mix of both. For example, their top navigation represents the 1st level of their site and the sub navigation is provided in the form of left or right nav.
With all this in mind, the determination to use a common html menu system over a more sophisticated jQuery menu system really comes down to the amount of time you are willing to spend towards the development of your navigation. jQuery is an awesome new technology, but defintely has a sizeable learning curve. If you do prefer a more advanced navigation system and don't have practical knowledge with jQuery, it's most effective to take advantage of an online jquery menu bulider. This way, you get the rewards of having a very SEO-freindly navigation system and the excellent user experience provided by jQuery's capabilities.