SEO Best Practices
2 On-Site Optimization – Site Level
2.3 Website Navigation and Anchor Text
Stating the obvious, site navigation menus are created to allow the user to traverse the website. These menus should also allow Search Engine spiders or bots to crawl the site. Search Engines cannot crawl JavaScript generated menus, nor can they crawl Flash menus or Flash websites. Search engines cannot crawl form posted navigation. They can crawl anchor text links, image links and image maps. If any of the non crawl-able methods are used, alternative methods should be provided to allow Search Engine crawling and indexing of the site.
The ideal method is to embed the keyword phrases in the site navigation using plain hypertext anchor links. If image links are used, the ALT attribute should contain the keyword phrase. Additionally, it does not hurt to put the keyword phrases in the Anchor TITLE attribute.
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