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)
