Efficient SE-Friendly Navigation
How important can a navigation menu really be? Most people would simply say it helps visitors to navigate through pages on a website with ease; while others would say that it offers a positive browsing experience and enables the user to interact with the content better. Well, Both are right! A good navigation menu will ensure that you are able to navigate through the entire website using minimum clicks. It is more like a TOC (table of contents) for a website, where one can find all the pages a website has, and (to an extent) gauge the amount/type/heriarchy/taxonomy of information available.
The navigation menu can have simple or complex structures depending on the number of pages in a website. A website can also contain a simple navigation menu that simply leads to an: About Us, Services, portfolio, and contact us pages (for instance). A more complex navigation menu will consist of sub-menus and sub-sub-menus (tags, link clouds etc…).
Image A: Simple Navigation Menu
Image B: Complex Navigation Menu
One of the important things to remember is that the more pages within a website, the more important (and crucial) the role of the navigation menu becomes.
So how can you create an efficient, easy to use navigational menu? You can create it by using SSI or Server Side Includes. SSI is basically a set of ‘directives’ or instructions, which are included within a HTML document and are mostly used for executing particular commands. These commands can include anything from inserting an image, to inserting text, or highlighting a particular part of the web page content etc. These directives are as a rule processed on the server side (and hence the name!) and hence it is able to merge into the HTML file without any difficulty.
Here are some easy steps for creating a navigational menu using SSI:
Step 1: You need to create the HTML file for navigation menu first. Most common is the simple horizontal menu file that has the following:
Home | About Us | Products | Services | Contact Us
You can use Dreamweaver or FrontPage as the HTML Editor to create the file and save it using a .shtml extension e.g. mainnavi.shtml
Step 2: Now you need to insert the navigation menu file or the mainnavi.shtml file into the main HTML file (index page HTML file). In fact, you will need to insert the mainnavi.shtml file into all the pages you have created, which are:
Home | About Us | Products | Services | Contact Us
You can see the SSI directive at: http://BizSuccessOnline.com/SSI_CodeSnippet and copy it from here to paste it just above your SSI directive. One of the important things that you need to remember is that you can’t use an absolute path using a SSI directive. Once this is taken care of, all you have to do is upload the file on your server and you are ready to roll!
You can visit our SEOiQ Testing Center and check the various features that will help you to optimize your navigational menu and your website. You can even sign up for a 14-day free trial program – what a bargain!
Using Alt And Title Tags For Images And Links
And you thought creating effective and optimized page content was that easy? Well! It is, if you are able to understand the importance of different ‘on page’ elements like the ALT and Title tags in images as well as links. The ALT and Title tags are great enhancments to SEO, and they appeal to search engine spiders as well as website visitors (Yay! Both Spider and Human friendly!). Remember, ALT and Title attributes have the ability to increase the usability level of your website (Especially for ADA enabled sites). So where does that really leave us? At the starting point where you need to understand where to place the attributes, when to use them and most importantly why use them in the first place.
The Purpose of ALT and Title tags
The ALT attribute has been specifically designed to act as the text description where images are concerned. When you browse on the web, you will find that on several websites, some text will be displayed before the image gets loaded; this is the ALT tag. It will show up in all the major or top browsers. In text-specific browsers like Lynx, instead of the image, people will get to see the ALT tag/text.
On the other hand, the Title attribute can be used for any type of page element even though it is not a mandatory requirement for all page elements. You can use the Title attribute for describing tables, links, individual rows in a table, and even some of the other structural elements in HTML. A comparison will reveal that the Title attribute is much more versatile vis-à-vis the ALT attribute and there are several search engines whose ranking algorithms consider the text mentioned within a Title attribute as standard page content.
There are quite a few benefits of both ALT and Title attributes and here are some of them:
1. They play an important role in enhancing the browsing experience of all visitors and especially those who have disabilities
2. Using ALT and Title attributes, you will be able to not only increase the keyword density score of your web page but also the overall relevancy for each and every targeted keyword used on your web page.
3. One of the important aspects of the ALT and Title tags is that they offer valuable information to a visitor by displaying descriptive text and link titles regarding different page elements.
Some people think that adding the ALT and Title attributes to a webpage might be difficult but that is not the case. In fact, it is quite easy and simple to add the ALT and Title attributes to the existing code. Here are some examples that will help you to understand how they can be added to an HTML tag.
{<img src=”trekking.jpg” width=”500″ height=”300″ alt=”trekkers walking towards Lapah at 12000feet”/>
<table width=”100″ border=”2″ title=”summer camp 2008 in Himalayas”>
<a href=”page1.html” title=”summer camp 2008″>summer camp 2008 in Himalayas</a>>
<form name=”application” title=”summer camp 2008 application” method=” ” action=” “>
</body>}
Here is how it looks:
To know how best you can use ALT and Title tags, check out the various features of the SEOiQ Testing Center. Take advantage of the 14-day free trial by signing up now!
Importance of Sitemaps In SEO
So, you are on the prowl again for an elusive or uncommon SEO tip or trick that can win you accolades from the Search engines? Have we got a tip for you…(wink wink)
The sitemap is, arguably, one of the most underestimated SEO tips for new and existing webmasters – with major importance. And, just as the name implies, a “Sitemap” is a single page that explains the structure of your website for search engine spiders/robots. The main function of a sitemap is to guide the search engine spider through all of your sites content, simply and using a easy to decipher XML format. This enables the maximum amount of pages/data crawled – without getting lost in the maze of pages code, javascript etc. One important thing to note is after creating a sitemap is to always update it – an outdated sitemap is not worth much 
.
So, who does this help? My site is already in the Google and Yahoo index?
Well, it helps you. Period. If you update your sitemap just as regularly as you update your website, you will find that search engines will ‘fall in love with your website’ while visitors will be swarming it for more juicy and latest information/services or products. Simply said, sitemaps are a very easy yet effective way of communication your fresh content with search engines. Just as you tell the search robots which parts of your site to include or exclude in robots.txt, a sitemap will naturally guide the search robots to he particular pages (you say are important) to a visitor.
Now that we have established the importance of sitemaps, you need to know some other things related to it for SEO purposes. A conventional sitemap holds no water as far as Google is concerned. You may get lucky with Yahoo! and MSN as they consider the standard HTML format for sitemaps. Google on the other hand used XML format which is completely different from the standard HTML format that most sites have for visitors belonging to the human race! Well, Google simply has to do things differently.
So, you need to have two sitemaps – one for the Googlebot and one for human visitors. Also, Google has stated that it doesn’t consider two sitemaps as duplicate content and therefore, you will not be penalized for this SEO practice! Besides the obvious two benefits – one being easier navigation and increased visibility through search engines, sitemaps also act as the messengers of latest news/changes made on your website. They tell search engine robots about the changes made on your site and help them index the pages faster as compared to when your web site doesn’t have sitemaps.
One of the best benefits of utilizing sitemaps for SEO purposes is that when you submit a sitemap to a search engine, your reliance on external links becomes very less. And, you offer the search engine robots another way to find your site for indexing.
Once you have added a sitemap on your site and submitted it to SEs as well, you can use the SEOiQ Testing Center on our website, that allows you to compare your site’s PageRank, Backlinks, total pages indexed, Compete Rank, Alexa Rank, and Technorati Rank to know how it fares against your closest competitors and to see where you stand in the industry.
For more information on how to use the Sitemaps for search engine optimization purposes and to use the SEOiQ Testing Center features, take advantage of our 14-day free trial by signing up now!
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Text Area #3
This is an area on your website where you can add text. This will serve as an informative location on your website, where you can talk about your site.
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