In today’s online world, using cascading style sheets, or CSS, for your website’s navigation is key to getting all of your pages indexed in the search engines.

Why is it important to have all of your pages indexed? Only indexed pages can be returned in the search results. If the search engine spiders can’t find a page, then a searcher can never find it through the search engines, either.

One important factor in ensuring that your pages get indexed is how you set up the navigation on your site. In order for the spiders to crawl and index your site efficiently and completely, your navigational links must be plain HTML text.

Using cascading style sheets to style plain text navigation

Creating a navigation bar using the CSS property allows you to use plain HTML text without it looking like plain text. CSS web page navigation can achieve the same stylized effects as fancier JavaScript and Flash navigation, for example rollovers and dropdown menus, by using standard HTML tags such as <ul> and <a> that the spiders can easily follow.

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