MaineBusiness.com

Text Navigation Helps Your Search Engine Rank

Search engines uses mathematical algorithms to determine whether your site should rank above your competition. There are many variables that make up this algorithm, all varying in weight or importance.

Your site's navigation is an important variable in this algorithm. Search engines send programs called spiders or robots to visit your site that follow the links on your page and index the content. The search engines then use this information to determine how relevant your site is to a given search.

These spiders aren't especially smart, and many things can trip them up. They have difficulty with Flash, for example, so if you have Flash navigation you should have a back up plan for driving qualified traffic to your site, such as pay-per-click advertising.

Spiders are also blind, meaning they can't see images. They can read the "alt" tags (what you often see in the yellow boxes as you roll over an image), but they don't necessarily give them a lot of weight in the algorithm. In other words, they can follow an image link to your portfolio page, but they don't know if the button read "Architect's Portfolio" or "Free Tapas."

As a Web site owner looking for good rankings, you want to make your site as easy to navigate as possible for these spiders.

Lately, search engine experts have realized how much impact replacing an image-based navigation with a text-based-navigation can have. Image-based navigation doesn't necessarily mean having an icon of a house for your home button; images of text are treated as images by the search engine spiders.

For example, the image below can't be read by the search engines. Although you can read it, it's an image of text, not really text.

Get it?

Image-based navigation has been popular for a while with Web designers and site owners because images appear the same in every browser in every operating system. Text, on the other hand, can appear at different sizes, wrap differently, be resized by site visitors, and unless you're on a Mac, the font can appear jagged. In fact, unless the visitor has the font installed on their computer, it won't even show up!

That's a strong argument for image-based navigation.

However, if search engines are a big part of your marketing mix, you may want to reconsider your current image-based design.

The Search Engine Roundtable reports on a thread at WebmasterWorld.com on the Power of Text Navigation.

The site in question changed only their navigation to text and went up 45 positions (4.5 Google pages) for their "trophy" keyword. They also saw other keywords rank in the top three after being on secondary pages at Google.

Now, if you change your navigation to text-based, but your buttons still have generic labels like "portfolio" or "about us", then you probably won't see much impact. But, if your navigation includes important keywords, such as "Portland Coffee Houses" or "About Pediatric Services" you'll most likely notice a much bigger difference.

In other words, YMMV. (Your mileage may vary.)

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