keyword rich paragraph at the bottom of the page

someone mentioned it can have some power

[bluecorr]

Someone mentioned a while ago that having a h1 or h2 followed by a keyword rich phrase/paragraph can influence rankings a bit. Do they have to be at the bottom of the page content or at the very bottom of the source code just before the body tag?

[martinibuster]

Top is important. Bottom is less important.

[Clovis]

a good rule of thumb to remember is spiders read pages the same way most people do, top to bottom, left to right.

[martinibuster]

Good point Clovis. The importance of left to right comes into play when you have a left side navigation bar, or a bunch of features and pop-ups etc on the left side, with the main content in the center.

What happens is that all your left hand navigational content is the actual Top of the page, while the main content area is actually somewhere in the middle.

[bluecorr]

Actually all my content is right after the body tag because I'm using CSS for layout instead of tables. Content first, then navigation (which visually is on the left) then graphics etc. So I know the top is important. I was wondering if I'm missing out on a potential improvement in rankings by ignoring the bottom.

Can the one who made that statement give some details? I can't remember who it was.

Thanks

[Clovis]

if you have good, keyword rich text ready to put on your site... do it. typically the suggestion is no less than 250 words of text for an effective body. the fact that it's at the bottom of the page means it will carry less weight, but the addition of text is a good thing in my opinion.

[agerhart]

All good suggestions and points.

There is certainly tremendous value to having the content as close to the top as possible, but I feel there is also value in having content/text/headings at the bottom as well.

Ideally, imo, a page should have an even layout. Try to get important content/text/headings as close to the top as possible, but also follow up at the bottom if possible.

[pageoneresults]

Ideally, imo, a page should have an even layout.

The key is balance. As bluecorr, I too utilize css and absolute positioning. Having total control over where your html is positioned plays an important role in the overall optimization strategy. I can support that statement with many sites built using css.

Content first, then navigation (which visually is on the left) then graphics etc.

bluecorr, remember, navigation and graphics are part of the equation. If you've optimized your navigation and your graphics are being utilized as they should be in the overall scheme of things, you've got somewhat of a balance from top to bottom.

I like closing paragraphs that maybe summarize the rest of the page. I like to split pages up and utilize keyword rich links at the end of the page leading to second and third pages. I even go as far as using additional metadata to help the spiders crawl a group of pages.

<link rel="prev" href="http://www.example.com/page-1.htm">
<link rel="next" href="http://www.example.com/page-3.htm">

I believe I remember the discussion that bluecorr refers to. We were talking about having an <h> tag at the bottom of the page. I felt that <h> tags have much more weight when followed by at least a paragraph of good content.

[bluecorr]

thanks pageoneresults and agerhart for your input :)

[tedster]

The end of many academic documents is a summary paragraph that naturally contains keywords. SE algos used to give a boost to the end of the page content for this reason - AV most definitely.

I haven't done any recent testing on this. However, I know that the first thing many users do is scroll to the bottom so they can scan the whole page and see what they're dealing with. A solid summary right there at the end does a lot of good. It's only natural to have a sensible keyword emphasis in that spot.

Bottom of the source code is what I'd aim for, if other layout factors allow.