Position of keyword text on a page

How important is it?

[fom2001uk]

I'm trying to optimise a few pages on a site we've just re-designed. I've just ran a sample page through one of the search engine simulators to see how the text is being picked up.

Unfortunately, there is a pull-down menu full of text (which is being picked up first) which appears higher on the page and within the code, than the area of body text.

In this case, the table layout trick won't work with our design, so there is no way to move this.

What I'm wondering is how much is this going to hurt our optimised pages ? Everything else will be in place - page title, metadata, headline text, ancor text, and alt tags.

Within the grand scheme of things, how vital is it to have keyword text appear high in the code ?

[agerhart]

In my opinion, as long as there is plenty of the content on the page, it doesn't need to be at the very top, but it also shouldn't be all the way at the bottom of the code. It sounds like your pages are falling into a happy medium.

While having the content positioned at the top of the code, the off-page criteria can balance out not having the content positioned at the top.

[Travoli]

I have seen pages with drop-downs pull in may more referrals because of the words contained within them.

I say test the page as-is. See if it pulls in more referrals.