Not SEO-Friendly Website Navigation Techniques

It is quite tempting to resort to graphical and media-type of navigation for appearance and interactivity. But in search engine optimization ( SEO ), these can still be no-no options. Search engine spiders are generally designed to crawl text-based pages. Whenever spiders don't have the capacity yet to understand website content other than text, the following navigation techniques must be avoided in SEO Web design :

1. Frames

Search engine still have some difficulty reading pages within frames. This is because search engine will index them as broken links. As such, only the navigation part will most likely be read while the linked page will be read as blank.

2. Flash

Search engine cannot possibly analyze image and video contents of a flash-based website. Creating a text-based html description of the page might give some information about flash-content. But this will only double your effort making two pages but spiders will only index one of them.

3. Graphical Navigation Icons or Buttons

Search engine cannot extract content from an image made up of pixels. Making use of Alt tags will only have lesser SEO impact compared to using text-based navigation system. Moreover, your site will also miss the dual SEO benefits of anchor text.

4. Javascript

Search engine spiders cannot effectively follow links within or generated by javascript. Although an alternate text navigation could help a bit to crawl other pages of your site, it is already steps behind when you just simply used text-based navigation.

5. Dynamic URL's and Session ID's

Dynamic URL's and session ID's are unique identifiers to track visitor's navigation path. However, each visit can generate a different URL or ID and then terminate upon closing browser. Seacrh engine will not or cannot index almost entirely same content but of different URL's.