Do spiders know exactly where your text is located on page?

[dan_popescu]

Hi
I'm about to build my second website. Since I have a bit of experience now, I wanna pay more attention to layout - particularly the location of important keywords. It's been stated many times that they should be placed "up on the page".

My question is: does a search engine see the page, or "up on the page" actually means at the beginning of HTML code. If, for instance I build a page using layout tables, I might have sth else at the beginning of BODY tag - like MENU links etc. And the main keyword, even though it might be up on the page for the user, is it the same for the SE spider?

Thanks,
Dan

[jimbeetle]

Spiders don't see the page the way we read it, especially if you're using tables. You'll be very surprised where your text winds up.

If you use a WYSIWYG editor such as Frontpage you might think important text is near the top but it depends on how the tables are laid out. You can get a halfway good idea just by looking at the source code -- you might find that the first occurrence of your keywords is halfway down the page.

Or, use a tool such as Sim Spider at searchengineworld. It gives you a great look at how SEs see your page.

Jim

[andreasfriedrich]

Looking at the source code will tell you what UAs see. That is the whole point of human readable document formats as opposed to binary ones.

Andreas

[dan_popescu]

Thanks guys.

Dan

[Robert Charlton]

>>I might have sth else at the beginning of BODY tag - like MENU links etc<<

Dan - Yes, the nav bars etc can be distracting. Using tables, there's nothing you can do about navigation at the top. Left-hand nav bars can be moved to lower down in the code by something called the "table trick." Thread, including other discussion, here...

[webmasterworld.com...]

If the nav bar is significantly shorter the the main text content cell, you do have to add paragraphs with <br /> tags under the nav bar to hold it up, even with IE.

I just finished optimizing a site that had so much distracting stuff in the nav bar that I felt the table trick was necessary, and I ended up pulling my hair out to keep the cell containing the transparent spacer gif from getting larger than one-pixel high. Be prepared to fool around with the template for a while... but the "trick" does work.

[sun818]

That's why right nav work so beautifully by placing your content ahead of the navigation without any "trick". Apparently right nav gets 1% more clicks [webmasterworld.com] for some webmasters.

[tedster]

It does put some restrictions on your page layout, but I've had very good results with creating a "content" div that is absolutely positioned so I can move it to the top of the HTML document.

I recently downloaded the new Opera 7 beta, which has a "small screen' setting so you can see what a handheld device will display. The absolutely positioned content shows up first - since the screens are small, their browser ignores CSS positioning and stacks up page elements in "spider vision" sequence! Another adavantage to the absolute position