Search Engine Optimization Programs | SEO Tutorial Program

Graphic Navigation Menu

Aesthetic graphical designs, logos, buttons, and menus definitely add visual charm to a website, but search engines, since they look for relevant content and websites that are user friendly only, pay little attention to how good a webpage appears to netizens. Instead, if a search engine happens to get the feeling that the user friendliness and the content quality of a webpage is being compromised for pepping up its overall look, will not hesitate to reprimand such a webpage by demoting it in page ranking or pushing it down in search results. This article focuses on such a situation in which graphic navigation menus can be counter productive and play spoil sport in page rankings in a big way.

First of all, a graphic navigation menu is a navigation menu that uses graphic images or sometimes graphical texts to serve as a menu link, instead of text links with the internal link to the other pages containing keywords within it. If you are a frequent user of the internet, you might have come across web pages with graphic headers and graphic navigation menus. Sometimes, this apparent aesthetic sense goes to the extent that even if the navigation menu contains text, in order to make it more appealing, some designers create it in the form of a graphic image. The same issue occurs with graphic headers as well, in which case the impact is stronger and damaging. For the purposes of search engine optimization, it should be understood that search engine spiders cannot index graphic images or java script rollovers and hence having graphic navigation menus or headers will not do you any good as far as page rankings are concerned. In fact, over doing it with graphics can actually bring down the page rankings by numbers, thus nullifying all the search engine optimization efforts one would have taken while the page was in its designing phase. Therefore, for better page rankings, as a rule of thumb, stay away from graphic navigation menus as much as possible. One can afford to have a webpage less appealing, but not with a low page ranking. If a webpage is not appearing in the top search results, and if it is an online business, what is the whole purpose of having a website after all then?

If one is so particular about using graphic navigation menus in a website, then don’t forget to specify the right <ALT> attributes for the images. Or use both the image and hyper text links simultaneously. The latter might take a bit more space, but the arrangement is definitely search engine friendly, for the risk of completely avoiding the text link is eliminated here. But, still, ideally, whenever it is possible, do away with large graphic images, in headers as well as in navigation menus.

Tail Piece: Search engine optimization or SEO is a technique of designing or tailor making a website to suit the search algorithm used by the popular search engines. It includes a variety of factors, of which graphic navigation menus and graphic headers are a few of the major hindrances that must be done away with.