Navigation - Balancing UX & SEO

[AndrewY]

I'm currently evaluating our navigation in the course of a site relaunch. From reading a number of articles and posts on seoMOZ, here are the elements I've found important to consider:

1. Use CSS (not Javascript) for the primary drop-down navigation menu

2. Get rid of two design elements from our earlier days:  The 30 something site-wide category links in the footer, and many no-followed internal links (in an attempt to sculpt PR)

3. Keep all pages within 3 clicks of the homepage, and have ample cross-links within internal pages.

The one major problem I'm facing is how to balance UX and SEO in the primary navigation bar. To illustrate, let's assume I sell Tennis equipment.  If one of the top-level categories on my navigation bar was "Rackets", if I was designing purely with SEO in mind the category names would be:

Tennis Rackets ->

Wilson Tennis Rackets

Head Tennis Rackets

Prince Tennis Rackets

....as the full, three word anchor text will be most specific and valuable to pass reputation to the category pages.  However, from a UX perspective, writing "Tennis Rackets" after each category is unnecessary, and it would look MUCH cleaner to instead have:

Tennis Rackets ->

Wilson

Head

Prince

....but this would obviously be less beneficial from a SEO standpoint for each individual, manufacturer racquet page as the entire search term ("Wilson Tennis Rackets") is not in the anchor text.  As these links will be on every page of the site, I'm struggling with which to choose - clean navigation or improved SEO.

My Questions:  I would love to hear the communities thoughts on how to weigh the balance of these two - clean UX navigation vs. SEO-rich specific anchor text - in navigation.  Also, I'd appreciate hearing if any of my original 3 assumptions for the re-design are off-base or incorrect.

Thank you!

[RyanKent]

Your mix of HTML and JS should be fine. Please confirm by using the test I suggested above on a page.

With respect to your text navigation links, it really depends on how you position them to users. How many brands of rackets do you offer? If you only have three brands, then I would prefer three lines of full text, "Wilson tennis rackets", etc. The header of "Tennis Rackets" would seem unnecessary to me. If you offered a dozen links, then I can understand your position a bit more.

Another tip to keep in mind is Google will use the anchor text from the first link discovered on the page with respect to link weight and anchor text association. Google crawls a page's HTML from the top down. For that reason I present my HTML in the following order: body, sidebar, navigation, footer. With HTML5 Google can better differentiate page sections but I would still arrange the code in this manner until I had confirmation that content was given priority in this regard.

[AndrewY]

Ryan,

Thanks for the fast and thoughtful reply!  With regards to your comments:

We would be using Javascript to "show" the HTML div that contains the the dropdown navigation sub-category links, but the links themselves are in static HTML blocks.  I "think" this would qualify for an appropriate / SEO friendly use of Javascript, but would love your confirmation as well.  

As far as the balance goes, that's what I'm struggling with.  The best UX would definitely be to just simply include the brand name in the navigation structure after a tennis racket header (i.e. Tennis Rackets ->  Wilson), but with the navigation links appearing on every page on the site, it is hard to pass up s perfectly targeted anchor text repeated over and over.  I can always use other links to build authority, but is seems like there is a lot of "power" in the navigation, it's a waste to misuse it.

[RyanKent]

The three ideas you presented are basically correct. You can possibly use JS for navigation but it depends on exactly how it is coded. A rough test is if you right-click on a page and choose "view page source" check to see if you can see the HTML code for your navigation. If you can, so can Google. If you can't, then Google may or may not be able to depending on the coding.

No-follow internal links and any excessive links should be avoided. Internal pages should be kept a maximum of three clicks from the landing page.

For your tennis racket question, a couple thoughts. I would ensure the URL navigation is something like mysite.com/tennis-rackets/wilson or mysite.com/wilson-tennis-rackets.

You should also be able to smoothly state "Check out of selection of Wilson tennis rackets" once without it seeming spammy in any way.

You shouldn't have to choose between a great user experience and SEO. Google has done a lot of testing and is sharing what they feel is the best user experience. If you don't say "Wilson tennis rackets" one time, they feel your page isn't as well associated with the term as another page which does state that specific term. If you stuff that phrase in too much, then it's not a good user experience. Balance is the key.