Absolute best way to design navigation.

From a usability point of view, it doesn't really matter where the navigation is located, as long as it is easy to see, simple to use and fits in well with the rest of the page.

Personally I like the menu to seem part of the page design, rather than an add on, put there after the website has been created.

I prefer either on the top of the page (below a title banner) or to the left, but have written sites with the navigation on the right (not split it yet)

I'm not sure about search engine friendliness, but the important thing is that it looks like it belongs in the page. In my opinion asthetics are the most important part of a site. If you site looks bad, people wont stay, no matter what the content is.

Sorry I could not be more helpfull.

From an SEO point of view (very briefly)... Text links offer much more keyword value than images with alt/title tags, and the very worst thing you can do is bury your navigation links within some cool looking JavaScript or Flash that spiders won't be able to read.

If you're using a table for your page layout, keep in mind how spiders read the page. Text closer to the top of your code is given more importance, which means that tables are read row by row, and columns are read left to right (e.g. if your navigation is on the right & your entire page content is in a column in the middle, your nav links may look like they're near the top to your viewers but they're at the end of code).

And if you must use funky JavaScript/Flash menus, at the least include a sitemap (linked to with a standard text link) which includes links to all the important pages in your site so spiders can find them.

One thing I've done in the past to help compensate for JavaScript menus is use CSS to position the JavaScript menu over (a.k.a. hide) a text-based navigation system.

Quick note: spiders are nearly ready to support flash. Google traverses and indexes flash.

That being said, plain text navigation is usually best from both a usability and SEO perspective.

Very interesting.

Have a look:

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=Able2Know.com&q=allinurl%3Aswf&num=25