Main heading near <body>

Forum Moderators: open

Message Too Old, No Replies

Main heading near <body>

Tonearm

10:15 pm on Nov 19, 2004 (gmt 0)

Is it worthwhile to put a page's main heading right next to the opening body tag? I had it there for a while and then removed it, and I seem to have dropped considerably in Google's rankings. Could it be due to something else, or is this to be expected?

The reason I got rid of it is I thought it looked a bit out of place. I've been migrating from tables to div's and CSS, and I've heard of the possibility of laying your code out differently than it actually displays on the page. Would something like that work to get my heading (and the rest of my content) right next to the body tag, but allow all the templated navigation to show up before it as far as display?

webboy1

3:00 pm on Nov 22, 2004 (gmt 0)

I guess having it next to the body tag would help. I had heard that page headings where possible should be <h1> and should be as near to the top of the page as possible - and i guess you do not get any nearer the top than against the body tag.

However, there are plenty of sites out there that are doing well in SE's where the headline / title is not the first thing on the page - many have several table opening tags and main navigation code before they get to headlines and bodytext.

There are several other factors that could possibly be affecting it.

One thig i have noticed that many don't mention is that - just because your site may drop a few places doesn't always mean you have done anything wrong. It could simply mean that a few sites that were below you have done somthing right.

Hope this helps.