Optimizing Navigation using CSS Image Replacement

Site design does not have to overshadow your search engine optimization efforts.  This is especially true and important when it comes to site navigation.  Having search engine friendly Navigation is critical to getting a site spidered, maintaining optimal search visibility, increasing your keyword relevancy scores, and improving the transparency of a site?s topical hierarchy.   So how do you achieve harmony with the design team?  The answer is by optimizing navigation using CSS Image Replacement. Place the navigation in div layer.  Use a traditional text link with href in the code.  It will be rendered on the end users browser as an image by the CSS style applied that makes it look and feel like an image.  The result is that the search engine spider sees text, and the user sees pretty images. Navigation optimization improves the visibility of linked tiers, and provides the search engines with a clear transparency of a site?s topical hierarchy.

CSS image replacement uses a combination of style sheets and ordinary HTML to display a visible image, usually consisting of rendered text, while preserving the underlying text-based, structural HTML markup for search spiders.

 

Boost Keyword Relevancy Using CSS Absolute Positioning

   

One of the recurring issues I come across on optimizing ecommerce websites, is the lack of text on category and subcategory pages. Usually, what I see on the typical category and sub-category pages of an ecommerce site is a bunch of product images, and maybe, just maybe they have some content below the images. 

Adding more text will help the search engines determine what your page is about, and offers a great opportunity to use textlinks to build internal linking within your website.

Optimially, it's best to place the text under the H1, but above the product images.  Consider redesigning your page template with content placed just below the H1 page header. Content should optimally be placed closer to the top of the document.

Although, the classic objection to this is that the text placed in that position on the page will interfere with usability, page views (engagement), and ultimately conversions.

To the rescue comes a CSS technique called, Absolute Positioning.

Consider using CSS absolute positioning to effectively move content blocks across Category & Sub-category templates.  Content will appear closer to the top of the code structure, yet would appear at the bottom of the page when rendered within a browser.

The addition of more text is a way to optimize your website, increase your keyword relevancy scores, boost internal linking, and create a more engaging user experience.