Copyright © 2005 by Fabian Lim

A navigation menu is an important element of a website.

A good navigation menu helps your visitors navigate through
your website efficiently – in as few mouse-clicks as
possible.

You can think of a website navigation menu like the “Table
of Contents” of a book.

And the greater the number of web pages on your website,
the more important the role of a website navigation menu.

Another important benefit of a navigation menu is it
optimizes the internal linking structure of your website
and allows the navigation menu links to rank better in
search engines, since all web pages will be pointing to it.

(For example, if your website has 1000 web pages, each
navigation menu link will have 1000 web pages pointing to
it. This will result in the navigation menu links ranking
higher than the other web pages)

Here’s how you can use this knowledge to improve the
search-engine rankings of selected web pages – Simply
include the selected web pages as links in the navigation
menu and you’ll automatically have the rest of the web
pages pointing to them.

And finally, here’s one method you can use to easily create
a website navigation menu – Using Server Side Includes
(SSI).

What are Server Side Includes?
——————————
Server Side Includes (SSI) are simply instructions (also
known as “directives”) that are included in a HTML document
to execute a specific command e.g. inserting the content of
an HTML file.

The SSI directives are “processed” at the Server side,
before it reaches the requesting browser (hence the name
Server Side Includes).

As a result, the “processed” SSI directives merge
seamlessly with the HTML file.

Here’s an example of SSI in action at a website (i.e. the
left navigation menu):
http://www.BizSuccessOnline.com

Notice the left navigation menu is made up of static HTML
links.

This is to allow search-engine spiders to crawl through the
website to discover other web pages (via the navigation
menu links).

An alternative solution to get your web pages spidered by
search-engines is to use a sitemap.

A sitemap is simply a webpage that contains links to every
webpage on your website and should be linked from your home
page.

This will provide the search-engine spiders a path to
follow and will ultimately result in your web pages getting
fully indexed.

Note that most, but not all servers have SSI’s enabled.
Please check with your web host to find out whether SSI is
enabled in your server.

How to Easily Create a Navigation Menu Using SSI?
————————————————-

Step 1# – Create a HTML navigation menu file

This is the navigation menu file that will be inserted into
your HTML pages and is also your HTML navigation menu
template.

A simple horizontal text HTML navigation menu can look like
this:

Home | Products | Pricing | About Us | Contact Us

(You’ll need to hyperlink each of the above text to make
these navigation links clickable by using your favorite
HTML editor e.g. FrontPage or Dreamweaver)

You need to save this file with a .shtml extension once
this file has been created e.g. topnavi.shtml

Step 2# – Insert navigation menu file into HTML file

Open up the HTML file (e.g. products.html) and place the cursor on the location where you wish to insert the navigation menu.

Click here to view the SSI directive:
http://BizSuccessOnline.com/SSI_CodeSnippet

And copy and paste the above SSI directive at the cursor.

(Be sure to replace “your_navigation_filename.shtml” with the name of your navigation menu file)

Note: You CANNOT use absolute path with an SSI directive:
e.g. Do not use http://yourdomain.com/topnavi.shtml

And finally, save the HTML file with a .shtml extension e.g.
products.shtml

Step 3# – Upload files onto your server

The last step is to upload the newly created .shtml files
onto your web server and check to make sure the pages
display properly.

And if you view the HTML source code of your HTML file on a
live internet connection, you’ll notice that the SSI
directive would have
been replaced by the actual HTML navigation menu code.

Maintaining your navigation menu is now a simple matter of
changing the contents on the navigation file.

That’s all there is to it!

Give it a go!

==============================
Fabian Lim is a Web Analytics & Internet Marketing Consultant.
He helps organizations and individuals succeed online.
Visit his website at http://www.BizSuccessOnline.com and
blog at http://www.fabianlim.name
==============================

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This article may be freely distributed in its entirety as long as the content, links and resource box above remains intact. If you use this article, please send me a brief e-mail to let me know where it appeared:
e-mail: fabian (at) bizsuccessonline.com

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