Dear Ross
I wonder if you can advise on how I should set up a menu structure (template) for a new site in a way which is optimal for search engine positioning:
I am in the process of designing a new site and wish to include an identical heading, footer and navigation menu on each page. However I’m torn between which technology to use to optimise search engine positioning:
- CSS – I’d love to use cascading style sheets, but am worried that they are not sufficiently compatible with older browsers (perhaps simple CSS dealing only with positioning would work?)
- Frames – used to be problematic with search engines; is this still the case?
- Tables – I don’t want to use tables because the whole table has to be downloaded before it appears.
- Javascript – again worried about compatability with older browsers, and users who have disabled javascript; also tends to be a rather long download time
- Hard code each page – too much maintenance
Any views?
Regards, P.G.
Ross:
I totally understand your predicament. I hope you are open to an entirely unmentioned option which is the use of Templates in Macromedia Dreamweaver MX. Dreamweaver has a great system where you add pages to your site using a chosen template (which you design and configure with relative ease). You can have as many templates as you want, which is quite useful for sites with countless categories that require different themes. Now, say you want to change the header in a template… just open the source template and make the change… then Dreamweaver searches for all pages using that template and updates them. From a SEO point of view the template system also works great; each template allows you to configure unique titles and meta tags for the page being created. — Here is some more detailed information on Dreamweaver Templates.
Even if you do not wish to work with Dreamweaver I would not recommend any of the options listed. My recommendation would be to use Server Side Includes. Includes are great because they are simply snippets of html inserted behind the scenes when a page is called. To anyone on the Internet there is no way (that I know of) for anyone to know that your site uses them… in other words the search engines cannot tell either. Just keep in mind that if you use this approach you should exclude the meta and title tags from the include so that you can properly optimize each page with unique keyword terms.
— Here is more information on SSI.
In addition, I would recommend using CSS to handle site-wide formatting such as paragraph fonts and headings. Be sure to create an actual .css file and link each template to it. This will make future formatting changes simple and it will decrease amount of code within the heading tags in each page.
I hope this answers your question appropriately Peter. Let me know if I can help any more.
P.G.:
Many thanks for your advice; the Dreamweaver approach sounds very useful and I’ll explore that further.
Regards, P.G.
Ross Dunn is the CEO and founder of StepForth Search Engine Placement Inc., an SEO firm that has been providing expert services since 1997. Rosss considerable experience in the world of search has made him a respected writer for countless publications and an SEO consultant for small business and Fortune 500 web properties.
