Sorry for the delay in the latest installment of my website construction guide for SEO. There are always lots of other things to do and people to meet that slow you down from these kinds of activity.

If you missed part one about Doctype and the Head or part 2 about DIV's and CSS you may want to go back and catch up on those before continuing with this one.

Navigation is a key area of the site, for users and for the optimisation of the site.

The best type of navigation to use is text links. Its fine to use images as the backgrounds for these, but the actual content of the link should wherever possible be a hypertext link.

Image links are still commonplace, and search engines will follow the links that appear in these links. However, the text that is used in a link to a page serves to tell the search engine what is appearing on the next page when that is clicked. A good text link explains in a few words what a user and a search engine are likely to encounter if that link is clicked.

There are many different types of navigation that are used on websites. We just mentioned image links, which are ok for a search engine being able to spider a website, but these offer very little "SEO" value.

Another type of navigation system commonly used is Javascript navigation. Now some navigation systems use small bit of Javascript within them no problem, but if the entire navigation is built from Javascript then the search engines will not be able to read it, as they ignore Javascript on pages within its index,

Now if a search engine can't follow the links, then it is not going to be able to find more pages on the site to add to its index. Part of the SEO process generally is to increase the ranking results of pages, but it is also to ensure that the search engine spiders are able to index every page that we want them to. The ones we don't want them to index we can restrict using a robots.txt file or robots Meta tags.

As I have already said, the best way to create a navigation system is using text links. People decide to use other types because they need more functionality than a static unmoving text link, hence the use of pretty images and Javascript rollovers.

Many people don't realise that the same effects can actually be created using text links and CSS. CSS drop down menu's and rollovers allow many different types of styles in a search engine friendly fashion. As mentioned above, these sometimes utilise a small bit of Javascript for the users, but all the links can still be seen as text links to the search engines

It is also important that whatever system is used is appealing and simple for visitor’s to use.

You can also include a text based navigation system designed specifically for the spider’s to follow. I would generally place this in the footer of each page as an include file, so that it is easier to globally update. The advantage to this is that you can also use keywords in anchor text; an important ranking factor. For example, rather than:

Home | About Us | Contact Us

You could have:

Car Credit Home | About Our Loans | Contact Credit Company

Ultimately, I would say you have to first satisfy the needs of the users of a web site rather than the search engine spiders. However, if you are wanting more pages indexed, or have problems getting your pages into the index, then you may want to have a look at supplying a secondary navigation system for this purpose.

The next installment is likely to be coming next week...... keep your eyes peeled!!!!