Using text links for navigation
This thread at Web Master World relates to a post I did recently about using images on your web pages for what is essentially text.
Its long been accepted from an accessibility standpoint, that the use of html text in site navigation (rather than gif images that contain graphical/font text) is a much better choice. It makes the whole user experience much more pleasurable, your pages load faster, screen readers can handle it more efficiently, you use up less bandwidth – the list goes on.
On the flipside of this coin, you usually have some client, designer or brand manager who insists on using the corporate font because it “looks nice” – lets weigh up the risks and benefits here guys!
The case study by Tedster, discussed in the post at Web Master World shows just what impact using text for navigation can have on your search visibility – he took an existing site which was using graphical navigation, baselined the search results for a range of keyphrases, modified the site to use html text navigation and then studied the improvement in rankings – there are some impressive claims:
On the trophy keyword, the home page went up about 45 positions, from out of the running to a second page contender.
and…
Lots of other major keywords went to #1 or into the top 3, from previously being 10, 20, or more positions down. In all, it looks like 200 phrases have improved from the benchmark sample we are tracking.
Of course, this is something that most good SEO‘s/page optimisers probably already knew, but its good to see how the numbers add up in a reasonably scientific test case.
Technorati Tags: accessibility, site navigation, screen readers, Web Master World, search visibility, html text navigation, rankings, SEO
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September 20th, 2006 at 11:54 pm
Wow, I knew that text links were better to use but I had no idea that it could have that much of an effect on rankings!!
Wow, it’s also expensive to join webmasters world.