Optimizing a JavaScript Site for Search Engines - Navigation and Effects

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2.  Navigation and Effects

You can accomplish some of the same functionality of using JavaScript by using an external stylesheet.  Let’s take hover effects with text links, instead of rollovers or mouse-overs for example.  CSS in an external file could easily take care of your JavaScript navigation issues, as well as your link strategy problems; while at the same time giving you rollover effects.  Text links with keywords as anchors should be your number one choice for navigation in the world of SEO.

“Ok,” so you say, “text links are ugly, boring, and my site visitors want some wow-factor when they view my website.  What if I want or feel that I need to have a DHTML or JavaScript Menu?”  Well, short of responding that this is not really your best SEO choice, you’ll have to find another way of alerting the search engines to your navigation schema while keeping your dynamic menus.  Even SEOs know that very visually stimulated people want to either interact with the site, or be entertained.  But if you want to have the pretty horizontal slide menu and the SEO navigation benefit, too, then you will make sure you have text navigation links as well; better yet, use breadcrumb navigation.  “Breadcrumb Navigation” is named for the fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel.”  Remember, the two children laid a trail of breadcrumbs to help them remember how to get back home?  This is the same with these so-named breadcrumb navigation links which either shows the path or the location of the current document being viewed, and how to get back where the visitor came from.

Remember that search engines still cannot read JavaScript, and won’t follow navigation in your dynamically created menus.  So, in order to enable the spider to follow the links to the rest of your site, make sure there are regular HTML links throughout the body of your page, in addition to implementing footer, side, or top navigation, as well as breadcrumb navigation.  Even if your breadcrumbs are dynamically generated, they still should end up as text links or a textual representation of a site’s structure.

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