Hi,

 

My name is Simon and I have just joined your site.

 

The question I have is this, a friend of mine says that my links based menu on my site just has too many links in it and is therefore causing my keyword links to become diluted - is this right and would I be better off having a javascript menu? If so what are the disadvantages of javascript and do I have to add noscript as well if I do that?

 

Hope you can help, all help greatfully received.

Yeah, I'd say the menu probably is hurting you. Having titles on all of your links means that you're treading into grey and spammy areas - it's possible to over-optimise and be misidentified as a spammer, and I think the menu is getting close.

 

Most of your page text and therefore keywords come after the menu - different search engines have various limits on how much text they will read from the beginning of the page, and ignore everything after that. This means that a search engine may only see your menu, and consider that to be the sole content on the page. Tricky thing is, a javascript menu will only make it worse, as the search engines will have a harder time finding their way around the site, or might not be able to navigate at all.

 

Best bet is to ditch the tables and move to a CSS-based layout - you can then place the main content at the top of the file while keeping the menu to the left of the screen. You'll also have less markup, ensuring that if a search engine decides to grab the first 1000 characters of a page, then it'll be mostly text with only a few tags.

 

It can be a bit of a headache, if you've not done it before. You'll reap the benefits with faster load times however, and your site will be even more accessible. It really is worth it.

I think your links look fine mate, as long as each link leads to relevant content you should have no problems.

You definitely need a static sitemap though, you should not have a link to an xml sitemap on your site, thats for google's use only. In fact laoding it just froze up my computer for 5 mins!

So are you saying that I should just have the sitemap linked from the robots.txt file?

 

Also what should I budget for getting my site converted to a CSS based site? I presume I just need someone to set up a template and work from that right?

well it depends on what you mean by template.. someone could just make you a psd website layout but that would not be much use to you really... you need someone to code it as well... unless you did that yourself ?