Welcome to the Joomla SEO Club and Book

In today's post we'll show you how to get add a clean and SEO-friendly menu to your Joomla site. This tutorial was inspired by several recent site audits we've done that revealed serious problems with dropdowns menus.

Four Frequent Problems With Dropdown Menus

• Menu sprawl. People think that because they can have 100 menus links, they should. More menu links are counterproductive. They only confuse visitors.
• Visual sprawl. Dropdowns tend to hide items underneath and often conflict with other scripts/
  
• Bad SEO. This isn't true for some dropdowns but if I often do SEO audits for large sites that only have 5 or 6 pages indexed. Why? They built a flashy Javascript or Flash dropdown menu.
• Unclear. When someone has clicked on a dropdown option, they need to hover over the menu to see them again.
  

Would You Like a Clean, SEO-Friendly Menu Alternative?

One menu option that we're using a lot on sites is a vertical, expanding tree menu. Often this is done with Javascript, but today we'll show you a clean, SEO-friendly alternative. It looks like a regular static text menu but when someone clicks on a link all the child links are shown.

This is done with Extended Menu which is a wonderfully powerful menu system for Joomla. However, its also fiendishly complex. "The documentation does wonders for the sales of Asprin" as my friend put it.

Fortunately, this menu is easily setup. All you need to change are the module parameters. To make things even easier, I just took a screenshot of Extended Menu settings. Copy these and you'll have your own vertical, expanding menu:

Click here to see the module preferences. (Warning - its a long image)

Comments (4)

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It's good to see somebody giving Extended Menu examples
written by edward, August 14, 2007

Extended menu seems to be the holy grail of professional Joomla services as Nobody ever explains it or gives good examples. Thanks for being confident enough to show simple users how to make it work.

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written by Anthony, August 15, 2007

Hey Steve,

Very interesting ... would you say that menus that output a clean flat list but use js to display the items with some effect - drop down, sliding, accordion - are google friendly if not visitor friendly?

Cheers Anthony.

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written by steve, August 15, 2007

Hi Edward - no problem thanks for the comment

Hey Anthony - yes (although seems to depend on how its done). Some Javascript implementations impede the googlebot but Google seems to be getting smarter. Some menus that we would immediately have flagged a couple of years ago now seem to present no indexing issues.

In terms of user friendly - we haven't done too much testing but there are quite a lot of usability advantages to a tree over dropdowns.

Thanks
written by Gary, October 19, 2007

Thank you for this article. It helped to clear up a lot of things for me. Most helpful!

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