I manage a large online health products store and I’m changing the format of the website so that all subcategories (150 of them) are accessible via dropdowns from the header.
However, I’m worried about having such a huge volume of anchors above the main content. We could populate the subcategories using ajax, however I’d prefer to do these as pure css dropdowns.
Do you think having around 150 links before the main content on every page will drastically affect our seo?
That the menu is a above the content on the screen does not mean it has to be above the content in the HTML!
As a simple outline:
...
<body>
<div id="content">This is the main content of the page</div>
<div id="menu">
<ul>
<li>cat 1</li>
<li>cat 2</li>
<li>cat 3</li>
<li>cat 4</li>
<li>cat 5</li>
</ul>
</div>
</body>
...
#content {
padding-top: 200px; /* Leave room for the menu to be added later */
}
#menu {
position: absolute;
top: 0;
left: 0;
height: 200px;
}
That way you can have best of both worlds: content first and show the full menu without reverting to AJAX which cannot be seen by those who don’t have javascript for one reason or another
No - but I seriously think that it will negatively affect your user experience…
Information Architecture, Usability, User Experience and other disciplines should form part of the holistic approach, which SEO is part of. This is a large topic on it’s own.
Thanks ScallioXTX, thats a good option. Do you think there are any disadvantages to having them at the bottom of the code? (accessibility?)
Seriocomic - Why do you think this will negatively affect it? The reason I’m making these changes is to improve the user experience and the ease in which the user can navigate the site.
IMO it will improve accessibility because a screen reader will start with reading out the main content of the page instead of iterating over the somewhat large menu. I might be wrong though.
