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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!
By Jeremy Hermanns | September 17, 2008 | Filed Under SEO Advice
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