Article in Web Design

As an affiliate marketer you want to build the most effective web site you can, that is effective for your potential customer and effective for getting a good ranking with the search engines. There are always questions on how to do that and one of the questions that comes up quite often is, should you use image based navigation or text based navigation in your sidebar?

One of the things that is pretty well established about how Google ranks your pages, is that not only do they count how many relevant links point to that page, but they also count what the linking text or more commonly, anchor text, says. In fact, you can rank very high for keywords that don’t even appear on your page if you have enough links into it that highlight a specific keyword. For example, the words “click here” don’t appear on the page at Adobe where you download the Acrobat Reader software, but more than 16 million web pages link to that page by saying something like, “To download Acrobat Reader ‘click here’”. This shows the power of links and the text within them.

So at this point, are you guessing the best kind of navigation you want to have on your site? Sure, nice little graphic elements make your web site look cool, but that kind of navigation isn’t always best. In the last few years there have been a lot of template sites springing up that sell some killer themes. I’ve seen some incredible templates with navigation that changes colors, changes size has moving elements in and more.

The issue with most of this kind of really fancy graphics based stuff, is that there isn’t any way for search engines to follow it. Especially in the case of Flash navigation, search engines can not see urls embedded within swf files, so unless you have other links on your home page pointing to second tier pages on your site, search engines aren’t following them and you aren’t being indexed properly.

There are 3 levels of navigation found on most web sites and they stack up like so:

Flash navigation – Probably the worst kind of navigation from a seo perspective. Flash nav can’t be followed.

Image based navigation – Not always the best way for search engines to index your site because all they will see is a url pointing to the corresponding page without any anchor text. Some JavaScript rollovers cannot be followed by the search engines as well. The addition of an alt tag to images can enhance the chances of getting a better ranking.

Text based navigation – The preferred choice because it is easy for search engines to navigate your pages and when they see proper anchor text pointing to relevant pages, you get an added benefit.

Ultimately, you have to decide how you want your site to look and what you want your potential customers and clients to experience when visiting. You can always use a menu at the bottom of your home page or use a sitemap to make sure Google sees all the links to the important pages on your site. However, the best way to insure your site gets indexed as it should, is by using text based navigation in a nav bar that’s placed on every page of your site. The search engines then know what the most important pages on your site are, no matter how they enter it.