Tune up your navigation for SEO

Optimising the navigation bar Your navigation bar is one of the first things a search engine spider should come to when they begin to crawl your page. That is, if it has been formulated properly. Many sites embed their menu in impressive technology that looks good but actually hides the site navigation from the search engines.

It’s important to keep your navigation in a text-based format to ensure that the search engines can find their way around. Plant your keywords in anchor text, but try to keep it natural. If your menu bar looks stuffed with keywords, it probably is. Sitemaps and site maps Having a site map somewhere on your site is a great way to ensure that human users and search engine spiders can easily find their way around your site. It’s also a good way of straightening out your navigation.

In order for your site map to be easily readable for the search engines, it’s vital to put it in a basic text form with hyperlinks. Some companies make the mistake of making their site maps too visual, and while this looks pretty, embedding links in images doesn’t tell the search engines enough about the link. A good site map will be an ordered list of your pages, using keywords as link anchors where you can.


Source:- http://www.lonad.com/2010/06/23/tune-up-your-navigation-for-seo/