Why Navigation Menus Should Be Text and Not Images

I have seen many fabulously attractive sites, but many of them have one major flaw. Instead of having links to different pages and sections in the site using link text (see our article What is Link Text if you are unfamiliar with what link text is)

Why is link text in your navigation so important? After all, many people feel that image buttons with text created in the image is much prettier, and the range of fonts is unlimited. But if you are also interested in your site ranking well in the search engines, image buttons can work against you.

When you link to any page, whether it be a page on your own site, or an external page, search engines put weight on the specific words used in your link text. One thing search engines use this for is to determine rankings on those keywords in the search results. It places greater importance on the words that appear in the text when they link to pages.

When you use images for your link text (even if you use ALT tags as well), you are not giving your site the best advantages possible when it comes to search engine optimization.

If you really do not want to lose the images, you can do several things to create the illusion of button link images. You can put each link into its own table cell, and use the image as a background image, then write the text in the table cell. Be sure that the cell is the same size as the image, otherwise it will tile the image multiple times to fill the space. You can also utilize cascading style sheets (CSS) to create the same effect of having a button image.

If you are wanting to optimize your website, you will have much better results utilizing text links for your site navigation than images.

For more on how to use link text on your own site, read our article Using Link Text for Better Results

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