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when designing your page from an SEO point of view which is better?
a:
<body>
<div id=leftnav>yadayada</div>
<div id=mainpagecontent>yadayada</div>
<div id=rightnav>yadayada</div>
or
b:
<body>
<div id=mainpagecontent>yadayada</div>
<div id=leftnav>yadayada</div>
<div id=rightnav>yadayada</div>
</body>
Anybody care to back me up on this?
From what I've seen, B would be the best option because it puts your "valuable, keyword rich content" higher in your code, which gives it more value to SE bots.
Why would your content being closer to the top give it any more value to SE bots?! Do you have any documentation to back this up?
To me, that sounds bogus. Search engines are going to look at the contents of your entire page, so putting it closer to the top shouldn't make any difference.
From an accessiblity point of view, A would probably be better, as long as you provide a link for users to skip over the navigation links (note, this link would not be visible to regular browsers).
What I'm saying is that search bots typically give more weight to content they read first on a page. I've read this several places (including WebmasterWorld). Not saying this is the key to SEO, but he asked which was better and it seems having the content before the links would fit the bill.
The beauty (?) of the <div> tag is that you can separate the order of elements in the code from the order things are displayed in the browser. That said, having taken over maintenance of many sites from sloppy coders whose WYSIWYG programs slather on <div> tags in seemingly random order, I'm not a lover of the <div> myself.
What I'm saying is that search bots typically give more weight to content they read first on a page. I've read this several places (including WebmasterWorld).
I wish there was information available from the search engines themselves that said whether or not this was true. Google implies that it relies most heavily on it's PageRank system, which has nothing to do with where your content is on the page, but how many sites link to you.
Personally, I don't trust SEOs. Their practices seem deceiving to me. Like used car salesmen. But that's just my own opinion.
Personally, I don't trust SEOs. Their practices seem deceiving to me. Like used car salesmen. But that's just my own opinion.
Here's a couple of links that support my earlier advice:
<snip>
"the closer a keyword or keyword phrase is to the beginning of a document, the more significant it becomes for the search engine."
Seems logical to me, but then what do I know? :)
[edited by: encyclo at 1:06 am (utc) on June 6, 2006]
[edit reason] No non-authoritative links please, see forum charter [/edit]
It makes no difference.
slightly longer answer.
It might make a slight difference, depending on the content of the leading nav - especially anchor text in relation to titles and headings of pages linked to.
I agree. It's 95% speculation and whatever fits their current view of the web.
No one knows what SEs look for except 5 people at each SE company.
Something like code to content ratio. Why would a page be less "valuable" because they use font tags etc.
"Search engingines have to wade thru all this code to get to the content" - Yes, that's what SEs do
Personally, I don't trust SEOs. Their practices seem deceiving to me. Like used car salesmen. But that's just my own opinion.
Those are probably the same ones sending out automated link exchanges.
So the source code for a left sidebar menu would need to come before the main content column.
(What's a AP site?)
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0
Based on what I'm reading, it doesn't look like the WCAG is getting much support for 2.0.
AP = Absolutely Positioned
