Have you ever gone to a site that has a graphic of a map, where you can click on each of the different states and a new page will come up? This is called an "image map." Most images that have clickable "hot spots" that bring up other pages are image maps.
Image maps can present problems with search engine rankings for two reasons. First, if the image map is large, or even the only thing on the page, there's no content for the engines to spider and index. Second, some engines can't read the links found in image maps, though many of them are getting better at it.
Drop down menu systems can present the same road block to some search engines. So, if your site uses drop down menus or uses image maps, be sure to include text links to all the important pages of your site to make sure the search engines can crawl and find those additional pages. If your image map is large and fills the whole page, try putting some text at the bottom of the page to give the engines some content to index.
To avoid repeating all your menu links on the page, simply add a single link on your home page or menu page that links to a "site map page." The site map page should then have links to all the other important pages of your Web site.
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