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.

Benefits of CSS navigation include:

• Streamlined, cleaner code Old techniques like tables and JavaScript are bad news for the search engines and hinder their ability to crawl and index your site. Using cascading style sheets means less code for the search engine spiders to have to sift through to find your pages. More pages crawled equals more pages indexed – and more traffic to your site!
• Ability to keep CSS styles in external files Referencing external CSS files instead of including them on each page also results in decreased code.
• Faster loading site Decreased code means the size of your site will be smaller and your pages will load faster. This is important not only to site visitors but also to Google, who is now factoring page speed into its algorithm. Faster loading sites with CSS navigation can appear higher in the search results compared to slower loading competing sites.

Help the search engine spiders find and index all of your pages by using CSS web page navigation, and increase traffic to your site!

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