Can Drop Down Menus be Search Friendly as well as User Friendly?
One of the popular methods for creating navigation menus for Web pages is using drop down menus. By mousing over any of the buttons of the navigation menu, the user is able to learn about some of the content of the corresponding pages without visiting them first. Some drop down menus are nested two or more levels allowing the user to access sub pages by one click. This makes drop down menus user friendly from Usability point of view. However, most techniques used to create drop down menus involve some sort of scripting (mainly JavaScript) that add behavior to graphical buttons, as shown in this example. Since search engines don’t index JavaScript and most of them can’t follow links embedded in graphics, this makes drop down menus search engine incompatible from an SEO point of view.
Building Drop Down Menus with CSS and Dreamweaver CS3
A more search friendly technique for creating drop down menus is using CSS and HTML. A List Apart published an article showing how to create a horizontal drop down menu using CSS. In this case, the navigation menu is created with HTML as a nested unordered list with all the items created as text links that can be easily indexed by search engines. However, this method can require some coding by the designer. Luckily, Adobe implemented drop down menu widget (called Menu Bar) into their Spry framework for Ajax (which comes with Dreamweaver CS3). As an example, the drop down menu for this Web site was created using Dreamweaver CS3 Vertical Menu Bar (view the Page Source for code details). Since the drop down menu in this case is created with basic HTML tags and styled with CSS tags, this makes them search friendly as well as user friendly.
maks said,
April 29, 2008 @ 9:27 pm
Hello! I like your site! Reader from Russia…
Search friendly drop down menus: Myth or Possibility? | Ask Kalena said,
April 30, 2008 @ 4:55 am
[...] Hi there - it looks like you’re new here. Welcome! If you like what you read, I’d really appreciate it if you could subscribe to my feed. Make yourself at home :)One of my Search Engine College students has written an excellent post titled Can Drop Down Menus be Search Friendly as well as User Friendly? [...]
Chris Estes said,
April 30, 2008 @ 10:44 pm
So check it out the whole time i thought you were talking about drop down menus. I think you meant to say Flyout menus. Maybe a graphic or on page example would be great so people can understand your lingo. I don’t necessarily know the correct name for it. But I use the term flyout or flydown depends on the placement on the page.
None the less they are great for seo. Using the unordered list creates a sense of organization and relevancy amongst links in each list which makes each more relevant for SE. Another good point is that this method works in text browsers as well were some JS does not.
Right on with the post. Just confusing with different lingo