Side Nav. Vs. Top Nav
-
I have a client that currently has a side navigation and wants to know how changing to a top nav will affect her SEO. We always recommend top nav for user experience but I am not sure if there is a direct effect on SEO. Would the change affect it? Thoughts?
-
I would.... put the links in the top nav and place adsense at the top position of the left nav.
-
Yea just think above the fold for your nav and links.
You can always design-silo the website to direct your users throughout your site.
This will help keep your home page in a healthy range for the number of links and you're most important ones at the top!
Using fresh h3 tags on other pages throughout your website with simple links will help a ton!
-
Great points; we have top nav and it's never proved to be an issue. I'm working on a project where we've migrating from left to top nav and I anticipate issues because its a change for the user experience and we've already trained them on a different nav.
-
if the linking is exactly the same it should have no effect on SEO, but could have a neg or positive effect on bounce rate and other user experience stats.
you could always safely a/b test it
-
Having your most important links in a top nav is great for crawlability and significance to Google about what directories or pages are of importance. Removing the nav is okay unless you can ensure keeping sitelinks from the home page of importance above the fold.
I professionally would avoid removing your top nav and maybe focus more on the mechanics of css/javascript-jquery to deliver better appeal to users for click-throughs and conversions
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Ecommerce web design read more toggle vs menu link on home page and product pages
Hello, We have an Ecommerce store. We have a lot of content on the home page and product pages and we are going back and forth between which one to use between a toggle "Read More" "Show Less" toggle for each section and a anchor linked menu. We have long product pages We're thinking a read more toggle is more appropriate for category descriptions so that they can go at the top of the category and not take up space. But the read more toggle with lots of content scrolls the page down and doesn't scroll it back up when you hit "show less" We're leaning towards a linked menu for the home pages and product pages for this reason, but an accordion type set of toggles would look nicer. What do you recommend, and how have you set up your read more toggles if they have lots of info so that they are not confusing? Are there other options? ' Not looking for code (I can do that) I'm looking for ideas on the cleanest home page, category pages, and product pages when they have tons and tons of textual content. Wanting to trim it up and make it look compact and neat! Thanks!
Web Design | | BobGW0 -
Organization name as text vs. as a picture with alt text + Schema.org markup
I'm looking for some feedback to implement best practice for the markup of our header/navigation at the top of our site. Our organization name and a tag line is at the top of every page on the left, then our logo, then our navigation to items like "Topics" "FAQs" "About us" etc is to the right along the top. Our organization name includes the most frequently searched keyword for what we want to rank on, and our organization name is our domain name. A couple other background items: we're a non-profit startup and no code is public yet -- hence, I'll be explaining what we're going for. We're coding in straight html/css, not using Wordpress or anything like that. When we originally DIY coded our draft homepage and a few landing pages, we put the organization name and tag line into the markup as text, to look like this: Organization name | Pretty | Navigation items over here
Web Design | | scienceisrad
Explanatory fun tag line | Cool |
--------------------------------------- | Logo | --------------------------------------------------------- Then we outsourced the markup of two more landing pages to a company that does on-demand orders for responsive markup, based on png's we sent of the designs. The company's code renders a fabulous looking version of our design, and important for usability, it is responsive. The company also did something else I'm not so sure of. They made one big image out of our organization name, tag line and logo ... because? The indenting and different font sizes of the Organization name and tag line was too hard to code in? Or is it just best practice for html standards, SEO, etc. to make it one big logo?? Now, as part of an overall effort I'm working on to reconcile our different code ... I'm mulling right now specifically on reconciling the different approaches we each took and incorporating new best practices for the header ... based on what I'm reading online about headers, including debates about whether to use h1 for your company name, whether using an image for the name is fine, advice about including Schema.org markup for logos, etc. Given all this, which of these two options look better to you? Do they seem equally good to you? What would you change about the one that looks better to you? What do I have wrong in them? Or would you code this entirely differently to hit all best practices? What do you think about using h1 for organization name vs. is there a better tag to use for the organization name to code it in as text? (Note: we have other h1's on our pages for the actual article/content titles of each page, which maybe we should, maybe we shouldn't be having those as h1's?) Option 1 -- using text for our name and tag line: <header id="top" class="brandfont brandcolor">
[# Organization name Explanatory fun tag line](/) Organization name logo {navigation code here}
</header> Option 2 -- name, tag line and logo all as one big png image: <header id="header" class="container"> Organization name tag line {navigation code here}
</header>1 -
Post vs Pages
Does Google make any distinction between a web page and a blog post? Assuming all else is equal...any reason why a page would rank higher than a post? And that includes a page in WordPress vs a WordPress blog post.
Web Design | | Pinlaser1 -
Text in Images vs. Alt tags
Hi on my homepage i h ave multiple images They have the appropriate alt text for each image, but the text which the image displays is not written into the page and styled using CSS rather than placing text within an image. Is this a issue worth correcting, or is it sufficient to have just alt text for each image. Any major pros from having putting the text in the image into the CMS using appropriate CSS styling to achieve the same effect.
Web Design | | monster990 -
Pages vs. Posts for SEO
Hi, I would like your thoughts about pages vs. posts for SEO. I understand the difference in terms of WP structure and have read the SEOmoz blog post about setting up your site for SEO success (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success). However, if you're trying to rank for a particular keyword, it seems that either one could work, from an on-page SEO perspective, as far as title tag, URL, meta description, etc. So how do you decide whether to set up a page vs. a post? What are the pros and cons, from an SEO perspective, about using one vs. the other? Thanks in advance! Carolina
Web Design | | csmm0 -
Question About Site Redesign and Nav / Page Structure
Hey guys, i am currently redesigning our company's site, and have come across some things that I'm not quite sure of. We used to have individual service pages in our main navigation (design, video, marketing) before the redesign. In this new design, i had the idea of making just one "services" or "capabilities" page, where these three services would each be outlined, and each service would have a list of links to more specific landing pages. Obviously, breaking it up correctly with HTML5 using the andtags. What I'm wondering is that if i'm going to be penalized for having those three services that aren't necessarily related too closely on the same page as opposed to having the one page for each service (like we have now). Any help would be greatly appreciated, and let me know if i need to elaborate more. Thanks in advance!
Web Design | | RenderPerfect0 -
Responsive Vs Mobile Sites
I know this is some cutting edge technology, but I think that this will be a very important topic in the coming months, as html5/css3 becomses more and more the standard, or at least standardized, I think the topic of this in relation to SEO will also arise much more. My question is simple, is it better to code a responsive site, or a completely mobile site for a small company with no special needs (mobile ordering, ecommerce, etc...) I obviously know the visuall differences, and, personally, I think respomsive websites look better. From an seo perspective, my big thing is for the resizing, for example, with WordPress, when you reach the tablet size you can set the sidebar to basically display:none, can that impact your website? I would really appreciate any feedback
Web Design | | ZacharyRussell0 -
Wordpress vs. mvc framework
What's the benefits of choosing an mvc framework such as codeigniter or cakephp over wordpress? Wordpress has so many plugins, and a universally known UI for customers, it just saves a ton of time. However, a lot of the 'big guys' like SEOmoz and Distilled(?) use Cakephp and other mvc frameworks so it has me wondering what the benefits are...... anyone?
Web Design | | DonnieCooper2