SEO vs Navigation

What is the best choice in setting up navigation?

[gniver]

The sites that I have been working with all have simple HTML navigation.

I want to change my navigation to drop-down menus. What is the best choice in order to keep being indexed well by the search engines? What types of navigation do they see, see better or not see? Or does it not matter if I continue to backup my menus with HTML links? Thanks.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

Couldn't you could consider getting the best of both worlds by having the drop down menus and repeating the menus in small text at the bottom of the page?

[gniver]

Yes I could, thank you. I'm just trying to get opinions on the best methods.

[pleeker]

As long as you're not burying the links inside a bunch of javascript gobbledygook as part of your dropdowns, the SEs will be able to crawl your drop-down links just fine.

That said, BeeDee's suggestion is the way to go.

[arrowman]

A presentational dropdown is fine, as long as it's implemented as a regular set of <a href's> in vanilla HTML with styles and perhaps a little bit of Javascript on top of that. Google for 'css dropdown', 'css menu' and such.

A dropdown form element is disastrous, SEO-wise. Avoid it.