I am designing a 30 page web page and would like it to have an upper menu structure with unfolding menus with anchor texts in the links to the different pages. The idea is similar to upper menus (News, todays newspaper, etc..) at: http://online.wsj.com/public/us My question for you is if these links (which would be in each page of my web page) would have the same weight (for SEO purposes) as if I put these links directly on the page and not in the menus. Specifically, would these unfolding menus pass the same page rank to the inner pages as if they were placed directly into the page? Note that my idea is to do this on all the pages of the web page.
If you are implementing the navigation with flash the bots wont be able to read it. If you are using javascript, they may have some trouble. I recommend having a redundant set of simple hyperlinks somewhere else on the page.
Thanks Bilz, However, my intention would be to have these links with the proper anchortexts. 30 links with 30 anchor texts might be a little too much, so if I can attain the same objective and pass the same page rank with these unfolding menus, then I would have the best of both worlds. Good navigation and good inbound link structure. Would there be a way to programme these menus so it would count the same.
These unfolding menus can be implemented in Flash, JavaScript as well in CSS. If you use CSS based drop downs, you shouldnt have any problem in getting the links indexed. In other cases, you should have links to atleast the main sections some where on the page also, with appropriate anchor texts to serve the SEO purpose.
Agreed that of the methods mentioned, only CSS menu would be likely to be followed by robots / spiders. For sure Flash would not be and I've not seen any evidence that JS menus would either. Anything that modifies the DOM tree after the initial page load (as most JS menus do) wouldn't get picked up by the search engines...
Another vote to go with CSS menus. You can make them do pretty much whatever you want, and they don't muck around with the SEO friendliness of your page.
Thank you all for your comments & suggestions. It is clear that I should follow then with CSS. I understand that with CSS, I can only show the category name in each page and a menu which opens when one puts the icon on the category. At the other side and for SEO purposes, I understand that all the links wich are hidden under these menus will compute as effective links so I can have one link from each page of my web page to each other page in my web page with an anchor text. That means that if I have 30 pages, I will have 30 links from my own pages pointing at each page. Is this correct?
directory submission and reciprocal link exchange,article marketing are required to increase the no. of backlinks on your site
Sheena, thanks for your input. I am trying to define the strategy to optimize my web page in terms of SEO. After I do that, I will go out and get links, submit article and so forth. However, at this point I am mostly interested in optimizing my web page.
In addition to optimized your site creating your content with your targeted keywords will help you get a better ranking.
Ultimately, we all end up back using the CSS variations with the anchor tag. I run a florida travel site and spent some time doing some flash based things to highlight some of the beaches. However, I ended up scraping the idea for the long run, because google forces us to play by their rules rather than doing what is best for the customer. Go CSS, and you will be better off.
Exactly. We all like the flash (well...flash), but there is no solid way to get that to translate into rankings... Eric