If it is coded correctly then search engines can and will read the links in the dropdown menu.

Are you referring to a mouseover menu, or a form select?

When adding or editing categories in WordPress, there is a field called "description" (not meta description) with the label "The description is not prominent by default; however, some themes may show it." Your developer can modify your theme so the description text is displayed on the category page.

Eric,

If you are optimizing category pages, I recommend modifying your theme to display your category description as visible text on the page. This will allow you to have some optimized text on each category page. I believe there is a title tags plugin that will allow you to change the title tags of your category pages individually, also.

A friend pointed out to me that a University site had been hacked and used to gain top Google rankings. But it was cloaked so that most users wouldn't notice the hack. Only Googlebot and visitors from Google SERPs for the spam keywords would see a hacked version.

See http://www.rypmarketing.com/blog/122-how-hackers-gained-an-easy-1-google-ranking-using-a-university-website.whtml (my blog) for screenshot and specifics.

I've dealt with hacks before, but nothing this evil and sneaky. Ever seen anything like this? This is not our client, but was just curious if others had seen a hack like this before.

Aye.

Oh, and hey! I just noticed I know you from NOLA.

I would be more inclined to move it to a subdirectory on the stronger site.