SEO - interlinking pages question

[belgianguy]

I understand that from an SEO point of view it is important to create a path between all your pages so google can follow this path to index all your pages.

I was just wondering if my path was a good one in google's eyes. Maybe you guys can help me out.

At my homepage I have a javascript menu, one of the buttons is 'categories'.

This leads to a new page. On this page all the different categories are listed in the sidebar (another javascript menu), with the different content-pages listed as links on the center of the page. Clicking on one of these links then leads to the actual content page.

I know a simple html/css menu is easier to follow and passes more link juice than javascript, but since I am using a php script I don't know how to change this.

WOuld it make any difference if I added a html menu of all the categories to the homepage? These links would than point to the actual categorie pages, so google would only have to go through one javascript menu instead of two.

I have a sitemap, so this wouldn't be for getting all the content indexed, but more for passing on linkjuice to the subpages.

I hope this makes any sense to you!

Any tips will be greatly appreciated!

[Bruce Hearder]

Unless your Javascript menu code is done properly, you are gonna have a hard time getting the search engines to find your pages through the JS menu structure.

Other ways to help the search engines are :
1. A decent sitemap of the pages you want indexed.
2. At the bottom of your home page put some text links to the pages you want to get indexed.

Of the 2 methods, I prefer the sitemap solutions. Make sure your sitemap appears in your robots.txt file (see Making WordPress and Robots.txt work for you )
Then go to the google webmasters tools and add the sitemap their.

Plus submit your site's RSS feed to a few places, and don't forget to ping it..

Much better then relying on a search engine traversing your JS menu structure..

Hope this helps

Bruce

[Adam Roy]

Ok here we go....This might be a long one but I'll try to explain my answer the best I can.

Interlinking within your sidebars is very common, text links which form a navigational structure of your site.

However these are only text links. They're only a 'title' per say, not a description of it's content.

The best internal linking structure, 'aside from' the common sidebars, headers and footers is CONTEXTUAL interlinking within relevant posts regarding the same topic/theme of your site or category.

What you want to do is create anchor text links within the CONTENT of your site, as well as within the sidebar.

Not so much in the form of a table of contents, but let's say for example you have a website about car repair.

You might have a post about how to change DRUM brakes on a pickup truck. Now within your content you might say "replacing drum brakes is more difficult than replacing disk brakes" Now in that sentence of your content, you might anchor text REPLACING DISK BRAKES linking to another post (Since you might have another post on your site titled 'how to change DISK brakes'.)

That example of coarse assuming you have a post about replacing disk brakes, and drum brakes. Both are EXTREMELY related. Internal, related, and contextual links will greatly improve your SEO, helpfulness to the user, and the ability to better pass link juice throughout pages of your site.

If you use wordpress, try the 'seo smart links' plug-in which will automatically anchor text selected keywords to link where you choose. In this case, throughout your own site.

Hope this helps