SEO Mistake: Using An Image For Your Navigation Bar
• My Client’s Site Uses An Image For The Entire Navigation Bar •
• Let’s Understand Why This Is An SEO No-No •
Dear oh dear. I am currently working with a client who wants to gain a stronger online presence and to begin to get top organic rankings. As it normally is with the clients who engage my professional SEO services, her site is invisible in the SERPs.
The web designer she hired to design what is visually a very attractive site, did the search engine optimization for her. Let’s just say that his SEO blunders are a great post for another day!
I’d like to touch upon one SEO mistake that is adversely affecting her website, and affects many other unsuspecting people’s sites. It’s the issue of her navigation bar and navigation links. It’s an image! A big no-no for SEO purposes.
The spiders have nothing to follow with her current image linking structure. Yes, the use of alt attributes can be used to get around a situation like this. It’s not a best-case way to solve it, but if you assign your keyword rich information into the alt attributes for each image being used for a clickable link, the spiders will then understand what is going on.
But my client’s problem cannot be improved via the fix I just mentioned.
Her entire navigation bar (which includes 16 links) is one image! There is a pretty background with sixteen words superimposed upon the image. I am not an html coding expert by any means, but when I looked at the coding that makes that image clickable for those sixteen unique “links” … well I scratched my head in amazement! I guess I could say it was very “creative”! lol
The coding to make each of the sixteen words “work” as clickable links is set up in the most archaic formatting. It’s just plain bad. Obviously that “web designer” my client had hired wasn’t very adept at clean, SEO friendly coding.
My recommendation will be for her to utilize a CSS menu (I’d like to see her whole website recoded using a CSS format). For a short term fix, I’ll advise her to get rid of the entire image and use a table structure.
Navigation links need to be crawlable by the spiders. As do all the other links on your pages. Take a look at your website. Are you utilizing images in ways that can hinder the search engines from crawling your website ?
