use ssi's to reduce the html preceeding content?

[sarkye]

If one is constructing a page with substantial content, but where the layout forces the use of big chunks of HTML on the page before the actual content text starts, would placing the 'chunks' in an ssi help as far as seo?

eg. if there's an independent table at the top of every page that's just used for logo, navigation etc, will removing that table from the page and putting it in an .inc file to move the content paragraphs up make any difference?

[toolman]

I've found that layers (<div> ) do this quite well. They order themselves however you arrange them and you position them by external sheet.

[WebGuerrilla]

Adding the table to an include file won't help because the file is included before it is delivered to a spider or a visitor. By the time it gets to your browser, the source code will look exactly the same.

TM's idead would work best. Position the layer at the top of the code, but place it at the bottom.

[tedster]

Toolman's idea for the navigation DIV works great, most of the time.

However, if you use it, be sure to look at every page in NN4.x. Depending on what code you have in the content DIV, sometimes Netscape totally flakes out. On sites where I use this, there are still pages where I've needed to go back to conventional (no absolute positioning) code.

The bug is not predictable, but all of a sudden your divs don't get rendered in their declared position any more and the browser reverts to rendering them in the order of the HTML document -- or not even rendering the complete content at all.

This seems to happen more on Win2K and WinME than Win98, but it still happens on all of them. Using tables in the content area -- especially more than one table -- seems to be one of the triggers.