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Do you use a side navigation bar on your website?
Many of us do - it makes for an eye-catching, easy-to-use
navigational layout.
The received wisdom is generally to place these sidebars
(constructed by using tables) to the left of the page. The
main reason for doing this is that visitors reading
western scripts read from left to right, and are therefore
more likely to be drawn to text at the beginning of a reading
line.
This is great, but unfortunately, search engines don't read
like us humans.
If a page has tables in it, a search engine robot will read
from left to right, yes, but it will read the entire contents
of a table before moving on to the next one, since it treats
anything after the /Head tab as main body text, even if we
don't intend it to be.
Chances are that your web pages are laid out with tables; the
first containing a logo, then second containing the navigation
bar, and subsequent tables (appearing to the right of the
navigation bar) with the text WE view as the main body text.
This means that your keyword rich text often doesn't appear
until some way down the page as far as the search engine robot
is concerned.
Since search engines determine relevancy by analyzing the
occurrence of words, particularly at the top of the page, this
type of layout is ultimately going to hurt your rankings.
I've struggled to find ways of overcoming this problem in the
past; e.g; introductory keyword rich text above the logo and
keywords in the side bar.
I achieved some success using these methods, but as a webmaster
in a competitive sector, I've been unhappy about
with leaving my carefully honed body text so far "down" the page,
when maybe competitors had the edge.
Then I discovered a way to arrange the table layout so that text
you want humans to see also appears first to robots.
You simply ADD ANOTHER VERY SMALL CELL to your table layout.
It's difficult to illustrate exactly what I mean in an e-mail text -
the easiest way is to take the following HTML examples,
cut-and-paste them to them into text editor, and from there, into
your HTML editor, then compare the results;
First an example of a typical table layout, which leaves
The body text in the wrong place;
table
tr
tdHomebrProduct 1br Product2brLinksbrContact Us
/td
tdlots of body text with selected keywords/td
/tr
/table
Now re-write the layout having added an extra cell;
table
tr height="0"
td height="0"/td
td rowspan="2" lots of body text with selected keywords
/td
/tr
tr
tdHomebrProduct 1br Product2brLinksbrContact Us
/td
/tr
/table
If you put this code into your WYSIWYG editor, you'll two see
layouts that look very similar, but with the second set of code,
your keyword rich body text will be in the place you need it to
be, and providing you've got the right mix of keywords, the
search engines will LOVE you!
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