How to Optimize a Web Site Using JavaScript Menu

In this web site optimization case study, the author takes a look at using JavaScript menus in order to optimize your web page for top search engine placement. "With 3.3 billion searches conducted every month in the U.S. alone, and with thousands of new websites being added to the global network of the Internet, making sure your website ranks highly is becoming increasingly important."

I avoid using the term search engine optimization, when describing what I do, because I believe this term is misleading. I do not optimize the search engines, not at least the major ones, although I have worked on optimizing the search features of a number of web sites. What is more appropriate, in my opinion, is to use the term web site optimization.

Whatever way you call it, the act of optimizing your site so that it may rank as best as it can for particular keyword phrases, especially with crawler-based search engines, is an important part of any web site's marketing. Taking full advantage of the power of search engines to bring targeted traffic to your web site will be an important step in increasing its return on investment (ROI) – after all, if no one can find your web site, it does not matter how attractive or user friendly your web site is.

This article does not deal with search engine submission, which is another important part of your web site marketing campaign. Getting your web site submitted to the search engines would not necessarily result in your site's reaching the top rankings for your selected search terms. It simply means that the search engines know your site exists. For more information on search engine submission, visit WebSage.

A web site can be found by following a link from another web site, or by going directly to the site's URL advertised either by word-of-mouth or by expensive branding campaigns. In addition, a web site can receive a lot of traffic through the search engines if properly optimized for both their web crawlers and web viewers. The power of search engine optimization should not be underestimated.

With 3.3 billion searches conducted every month in the U.S. alone, and with thousands of new websites being added to the global network of the Internet, making sure your website ranks highly is becoming increasingly important. According to WebSideStory, one of the web analytics market leaders “As of Thursday, March 6, 2003, search sites accounted for more than 13.4 percent of global referrals, up from 7.1 percent the previous year...”

How are these 13.46% of the total web site referral traffic distributed among the major search engines? According to OneStat.com, as of November 2003 the 7 largest search engines on the web are:

1. Google with 56.1% of the global usage share
2. Yahoo with 21.5% (with results currently provided by Google but soon to be provided by its own Inktomi)
3. MSN Search with 9.4% (with results currently provided by LookSmart which is to be replaced by Inktomi in January 2004 and by its own algorithmic search engine by 2006)
4. AOL Search with 3.7% (with results provided by Google)
5. Terra Lycos with 2.3%
6. Altavista with 1.9%
7. Askjeeves with 1.6%

Web site optimization for search engine positioning is the most cost-efficient way of web site marketing, and is particularly appropriate for small businesses and non-profit organizations which cannot afford costly online branding campaigns. In this article I will use the example of a non-profit organization's web site, BBFA.org, and will analyze the way it utilizes a JavaScript-based menu for improving the usability of its navigation, while achieving high rankings with the major search engines.

(Hint: The Other Test is Usability)

BBFA, the Bahá'í Business Forum of the Americas, is a non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of spiritual principles and values in business. If you run a Google search for “spiritual principles in business” or just “spiritual principles business”, you will see one of the BBFA pages on top of the “non-sponsored” search results page (sponsored search results are often out of budget for many small businesses and volunteer organizations).

Number one out of 324,000 pages – not bad for a small non-profit with no marketing budget!

Following the BBFA link listed on Google's search results will take you to a page sporting a nice JavaScript-based flyout menu – that is, if your web browser has JavaScript enabled.

The BBFA website utilizes one of the best JavaScript-based menus, developed by Milonic Solutions Ltd., and freely available to non-profit organizations.

So, how did BBFA manage to rank #1 on Google? To rank highly on a search engine's result pages, any website (including your website) needs to be optimized and indexed. As you prepare to launch your newly redesigned website you should keep in mind two important points:

1. Make it easy for the search engine crawler to index your website
2. Make sure your content is optimized for top rankings

Every search engine's crawler is different as are the algorithms used by the search engines to rank their results. What is the same is that every search engine's crawler automatically and periodically crawls the URLs of different websites and then inserts them into the search engine's index.

Web crawlers essentially behave as archaic pre-browser-web-war, circa 1995/6, web browsers – they do not understand JavaScript and cannot see layers (<div> tags). For those of you who do not remember (or know much about) the wild childhood of the world wide web, JavaScript was introduced in 1995 LiveScript, in order to enable client-side interactivity in the Netscape web browser. It evolved into multiple vendor-specific JavaScript/Jscript versions, and finally matured into the standard ECMAScript.

Since the JavaScript menu used by BBFA.org is built exclusively on JavaScript and hidden layers, the web crawlers are unable to follow the links placed in the menu. You can use the Search Engine Spider Simulator, which, as its name suggests, emulates what a web spider would see.

Just put your URL in the form and pay close attention to the links listed there. You will notice that if there were any links listed at all, they would be the ones placed in the content or the footer of the web page and not the ones placed in the menu itself. Why? Because the web crawler is unable to follow the links composed by JavaScript statements. All it can do is follow plain HTML links, i.e. <a href=”mypage.html”>My page</a>