Boost your SEO with well positioned content
Search engines treat content positioned at the top of the page with more weight than text placed towards the page footer. This presents opportunities to boost your web pages in the search results, as I’ll show you now.
Search engines index pages by differentiating your content from your web page HTML structures. They also seem to treat content positioned towards the page header with more weight than that postioned lower down the page.
This makes sense as you naturally place more relevance to a subject early on in your article to engage the reader and inform her about what the article is about. You can see this in this post so far - see how many times I’ve mentioned “content positioned” or similar, already.
So to maximise your SEO performance you need to ensure that your content is as near to the top of your web page as possible. Web pages are just text files, and search engines see yoru pages as text files, so this means that your content resides as near to the top of the text file as possible..
When designing your web site for maximum search engine performance, you should ensure that there is a little HTML code between the top of your page and the start of your content as possible. You can do this without sacrificing the quality of your design as long as your brief your designer properly.
Two and three column web page designs
Three and even two column designs can place your valuable content lower down the web page if you ae not careful. The HTML in a column can be quite bulky if you have many links, such as in a blogroll, graphics or email subscription forms.
If you don’t take care with your design, all this column HTML will sit above your content in your page, reducing it’s relevance to the search engines.
Using CSS based designs provide the ability to control where column divs reside in the HTML structure of your pages. Simply make sure that your columns are created lower than your content and you’ll give a welcome boost to your search engine performance!
