| SEO
Book Chapter 1- Section 9
When text
menus at the bottom of the page match the menu you have near the
top of the page, search engines may limit their rank effect. Search
engines are looking for quality material and links on your site.
Site menus tend to be very poor quality in terms of how they present
the site to the search engines. The linking structure tends to present
all the site’s pages as equal in value with a link to each
one. The link text tends also to be poor quality because the space
available in them is limited. For instance,
New Shockwave
Casino Games as a menu item is very long, so it won’t be used
in a menu even though it is very descriptive and unique.
In the
case of a graphic button, there is no text used. There is alternate
tag used in this situation which tells something about where the
link is pointing to. The alt tag applied to a button might state
”new Shockwave casino games” but often alt tags are
stuffed with irrelevant words. Therefore menus can be poor quality
references as far as search engine indexes go. Alt tags don’t
have a lot of rank boosting power.
On many
sites, the set of hyperlinks as you see below, would be considered
too ugly, and they’re often out of context to the copy on
that particular page. If you tried to place these links at the bottom
of the body copy on your about_us page, your company president may
call you, and suggest the links are inappropriate for that page,
and make it look ugly.
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cameras | Digital Video Cameras | Cassette Video Cameras | Digital
Accessories
Well you
could take this line and put it down below the bottom main navigation
menu at the bottom of the page. The search engines place more emphasis
on tags within the main body copy, especially in the same table
or table cell as the main body copy. This is because the links are
more visible and more likely to be clicked on. Google’s algorithm
in particular is based on the visibility of links. If a link is
visible, it is more likely to be followed as opposed to other links
that are hard to see or find.
As just
stated, standard menus are downplayed and unique material on the
page is more emphasized. That’s just good sense on the search
engine’s part. They’ll look for unique material on the
page that is likely more descriptive of the real page content and
better indicates the material that is being emphasized by the writer.
An addition to your redundant menu (appears on every page) is not
going to be considered highly. However, if that is all you are able
to do, it’s better than nothing.
That doesn’t
mean navigation menus have no effect; they do. You just have to
understand how the search engine views that menu in terms of quality
for their users. If they believed everything as stated in menus
and alt tags, the quality of their results would be poor. When all
the spam methods have been tried, the last element that can be forged
by web page writers is the cursive text in the body. If good grammar
is used with keywords in place, the search engine has a better guarantee
that the page is representing itself honestly. Search engines probably
will gravitate to some type of grammar checking. Especially, if
the content and links agree to what is being said about a site,
by other sites linking to it.
Site navigation
links can also be placed within bulleted lists, html drop down menus
or radio button menus. A search engine robot can follow all these.
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