In my last instalment, I reviewed a website for a marketing company that I crossed paths with recently.  This site (it shall remain relatively anonymous) had some major structural issues with it and I covered a few of those in my last post.  In this post I want to cover some other problems with the site that would prevent it from getting indexed and ranked by any significant search engine.
 
Navigation.
 
How your users interact with your site and navigate from one page to the next is a major element of web usability.  A lot of designers spend a lot of time thinking about navigation.  How a lot of designers get this wrong for human users is the subject for another post I think. The main issue here is that a lot of times designers forget about the "other user" - the search engine spider.
 
Search engine spiders index a website by digesting all of the content on a web page.  They then make a list of all the links that are present which get placed in a queue to be crawled sooner or later.  Ideally, those links should be text so that the anchor text (i.e. the text in between the "<A>" tag) can serve to better categorise the link.  Image links are ok - and will allow a site to be crawled, but they have a diminished level of usefulness when it comes to SEO.  A navigation system based purely on JavaScript however is an absolute show stopper. 
 
JavaScript is something that is processed by the browser.  When you navigate a web site using software such as IE or FireFox, the browser software runs the JavaScript code.  Search engine spiders (aka "bots") on the other hand do not run JavaScript.  And so building your navigation based on JavaScript would be like using a teleprompter for a blind person.
 
Take a look at the site we've been reviewing:

Those colourful buttons on the left hand side or images – not text.  That in itself is a flaw.  There’s no reason that these could not have been created using CSS so that the image is in the background and the text is on the surface.   But that’s not the whole problem.   Instead of using straight “A” tags around these images these designers have used JavaScript “onClick” events to get the user from one page to the next.   Please don’t do this on your site. 

Let me show you the consequence of this:

 As you can see, despite the fact that this site has been around for some time – no page other than the initial splash screen has been indexed by Google.  In order to get rankings in the search engines you first have to get in the index.  If these guys were to fix this one issue – they would at least be getting indexed and they could then solve the other issues (including a lack of content – which you wouldn’t expect from a copywriting service).

So what’s the message here?  Navigation is important.  Its important for your users – and so please get it right and think about them first.. but don’t forget about the other type of user lurking out there too – the search engine spider.  Its about being “search engine friendly” – hey we all want to be friendly – don’t we?