Sometimes when we make our sites, we often focus way too much attention on the design and we often forget to focus on search engine optimisation. One place where this often happens would be in the sites’ navigation.

Maybe you’re wondering why navigation is important to search engine optimisation anyway. Remember, we have to make sure search engines get to crawl our pages. It’s a benchmark of good SEO. If our navigation gets in the way of these bots, well, we’re screwed. If search engine bots can’t gather any data, that important page you need search engines to crawl may get missed.

You’d know if your site’s navigation doesn’t help your search engine optimisation if:
When JavaScript is disabled, your drop downs stop working
Header links are image based instead of text-based, without any alt tags
Internal links disappear when javaScript and CSS is disable.
Checking your site via Google Cache reveals that your internal links disappear

To prevent those those indicators of bad navigation from even showing up in the first place, let’s avoid using website navigation based on JavaScript or Flash. Remember, search engine bots don’t see websites the way we do. They don’t understand CSS or JavaScript or Flash.

Disable CSS, JavaScript and Flash on your browser. Go to your website. You should be seeing a plain white page filled with text and links, right? That’s how bots see your website. This is why we need to keep our HTML codes as simple as possible, and also this is the reason why we keep navigation as an unordered list of links:

Home
Services
Pricing
Contact Us

Of course Google is developing ways for their bots to be able to crawl JavaScript and Flash, but we really can’t rely on that. The technology there is at best experimental, and if Google fails on that one time we need to get one page crawled, it’s not going to be a good thing.