Search-Friendly Site Navigation
Site navigation is something that web designers have been putting considerable thought and
effort into since websites came into existence. Even before search
engines were significant,
navigation played an important role in helping users find what
they wanted. It plays an
important role in helping search engines understand your site as
well.
Basics of search engine friendliness
The search engine spiders need to be able to read and interpret your website’s code to properly
spider and index the content on your web pages. Do not confuse
this with the rules of
organizations such as the W3C, which issues guidelines on HTML
construction. Although
following the W3C guidelines can be a good idea, the great
majority of sites do not follow these
guidelines, so search engines generally overlook violations of
these rules as long as their spiders
can parse the code.
Unfortunately, there are also a number of ways that navigation and
content can be rendered
on web pages that function for humans, but are invisible (or
challenging) for search engine
spiders.
For example, there are numerous ways to incorporate content and
navigation on the pages of
a website. For the most part, all of these are designed for
humans. Basic HTML text and HTML
links such as those shown in Figure 6-12 work equally well for
humans and search engine
crawlers.
The text and the link that are indicated on the page shown in Figure 6-12 (the Alchemist Media
home page) are in simple HTML format.
