The navigation structure of your website has to be search engine friendly in order to be visible to search engines. For e.g. A website navigation structure created with JavaScript is simply invisible to the search engine; and if the only way to navigate round your website is with JavaScript menu, then you’re in trouble with search engines. This is because, search engines will not be able to navigate your website & they will find the web pages which have links pointed to them from other web pages.

Some Tips & Techniques and Tricks to work your way around the Search engine friendly website navigation structure:

• Add a sitemap page to the index page of your website. This way, search engines still have a way to access all the web pages. You can submit the sitemap to all the search engines every time you make any significant changes to your website. This is also called pinging search engines.

• If you use a navigation structure which is invisible to search engines – like JavaScript, Flash, you can add links at the bottom of the page. This is useful not only for search engines to access your other web pages but also for your visitors.

• The above technique is also useful if you are using images in your navigation menu. Also use the “alt” attribute.

• If possible, add keywords in the text links part of the navigation structure.

• Cross linking web pages not only helps visitors in ease of use but its very important for search engine visibility. One can use the breadcrumb navigation for this purpose.

You can generate a free Sitemap using the XML sitemap generator.

Ping Google : http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http://www.website.com/sitemap.xml

Ping Yahoo : http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=YahooDemo& url=http://www.website.com/sitemap.xml

Ping Bing : http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=http://www.website.com/sitemap.xml

Ping Ask : http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.website.com/sitemap.xml