Nav: Left Vs. Right
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- mg33
My girlfriend's company just updated their web site, and now feature a right colum vertical navigation instead of a left column vertical navigation.
Their web person said that because of the order search engines read pages in, a right nav allows content keywords to be read faster, resulting in higher placements.
He actually said "The reason so many people have theirs on the left is because they don't know any better."
So, settle this for me. It's news to me. If SEO factors into it, Usability should just as much, and probably 90% of people are totally used to left navs over right ones.
- fifty500
Well, if the guy's meta and html tags were better then he could rely on them to be found more easily by search engines. I guess I'd have to see the site for myself before making a judgement about whether or not a right navigation works.
- UndoUndo0
I have heard this argument b4 and I dont agree. Irrelevant of where the nav is (you can place it where you what with style sheets) the source should read like this in my opnion
nav
content
navit is extremely rare that navigational elements will provduce so much source code that spiders will stop reading the file before they get to the content. It is much better they know where other pages are in the site and can navigate to them.
higher ranking is not based on just content but is combination of multiple elements to a page/site. This includes content h1 p and title tags etc
the speed at which it is read is irrelevant.
- Chimp0
I thought most navigation items were on the left because we read left to right. Perhaps web sites for Arab nations would be the opposite.
- thinman0
nothing wrong with it
http://www.asksam.com/caseseeker…
- imakedesign0
i read an article about this a while ago, they measured the human eye and actually a nav on the right was easy to recognise than on the left!
- weestu0
http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/research… is this the article? it seems to suggest otherwise.
I think it depends on the target audience, if it's a broad spectrum, they will usually look to the top or the left for navigation.
The arguments about SEO don't carry though, as Undo said, you can place the navigation anywhere in the code and have it display anywhere on the page. See the mozilla europe site: http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en…
The nav is at the top of the page but at the bottom of the code.
- nocomply0
Whether you want it in a left-hand column or a right-hand column, you can still make the nav appear at the top of your source code. Its just a matter of how you implement the css (ie float:left vs float:right for the placement of the columns). There is nothing sneaky about it that will get you banned from google's listings.
I understand this web person's argument, but I think he's wrong. Please correct me if I'm the one wearing the asshat here.
- blaw0
people hopped up on SEO bug me a bit.
aesthetics and usibility oughta be the arguement, no?
and to that extend, i'm about ready to put a boot in "usability's" ass this week, too, but that's another story.
- hiten0
well we are doing a whole seo thing at my work. I work with a guy that works at YAHOO he says you should have something close to the top of your page that has alot of keywords on your business. For example this site has that one line at the top.
so the search engine like google picks up a few keywords before the other nav item because many navs have alot of the same items like about, contact and stuff. Well thats what he told me Im told to listen and impliment all of his suggestions.
so it might help results which would example that dude using a right nav.
- Rand0
search engines have become de facto rulers of the universe
- hiten0
yeah clients seem to eat up the idea of SEO friendly sites nowadays even before design and function they ask about SEO now I find.
- iodine740
Different spiders/indexers are going to each be abit different. Some are intelligent enough to see the patterns across your pages and recognize the "common shell" of your pages and ignore the content within when calculating rank.
We've been pretty into SEO for our own company sites over the past 2 years or so, and I've learned quite abit, and had quite abit of sucess.
Here are a few of the things that I've keyed in on:
-Title tag text on a page by page basis
-Meta content and keywords on a page by page basis
-KW in your Header tags
-KW in Link Text
-KW related URLs
-link popularity
-of course the content itself
-Age of site: We've had sites that had been around awhile and always ranked poorly. When I redesigned they shot up to the top of Google, they fall after a few months, and then float back up.I've had other brand new sites that were developed with the same techniques and some of them have yet to rank well... although ones with a "strongly kw-ed URL' are doing good all of the sudden.
- jakeyj0
google rewards those sites that adhere to web standards
http://www.alistapart.com/articl…
read it, print it, put it under your pillow
- jevad0
"Their web person said that because of the order search engines read pages in, a right nav allows content keywords to be read faster, resulting in higher placements."
Total BS
- mg330
That's what I thought jevad.
Needless to say, I tested their page in some online tools I use, and they can tout a right nav all they want, and it still won't correct the fact that their title tags, meta keyword and content description tags all overuse their primary keywords by a horrendous amount, to the point that they might be disqualified on a search engine.
- uberdesigner0
whichever way the wheel turns. know wha I'm sayin yo
- orkman0
Hey I thought people put branding and nav on left side because of smaller browser windows and content gets cut off on the right. Granted a lot of people run at 1024x768 or higher nowadays, and granted some programmers allow cotnent to scale with the window size.
What do I know?
- jevad0
I like right hand navs though
- uberdesigner0
put it on the right only if youre making a site for ned flanders' shop for left-handed people