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| Author: Jason Ciment |
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Overview of "Page Content" Structure
What the browser displays on screen is not necessarily the order in which it appears in the source code of the page. If you get sophisticated with HTML, CSS and even Javascript, you can maneuver the source code of a page (this is actually what a search engine spider sees) and move things around so that what you see on screen is not exactly how it appears in the code. You can use a totally kosher approach to fool the search engines by cramming (not spamming) the keyword rich text into the top of your source code even though it may not appear at the top of the page in the browser.
In plainer English, what this is all about is those ubiquitious and often keyword deficient logo and top navigational links which crowd out the more relevant keyword rich content you want the search engines to see first and foremost. So what nifty programmers do with some sleight of hand is to move your navigation section to the bottom even though on the page it still displays at the top of the page. The main section of your web page now appears at the top of the source code, and this is where the meat and potatoes of your optimization (ie the keyword rich content) is located.
For an example of a CSS encoded page visit
http://www.phpecart.com/
The other part of page content structure is moving as much unnecessary instructional content out of the page into external files. For an example see:
Advanced CSS Page Structuring
Timetable: Day 3 (Learn about it), Day 3-8 (Apply it)
If you remember in the Overview section, we talked about the 4 components of keyword calculations on each page. This section focus on keyword placement or keyword prominence – more elegantly this refers to "where" the keyword phrases show up on your page. The search engines give a different priority to content depending on where it is on the page.
As we explained previously, the first guideline to having proper structure of each web page is to put a variation of your primary keyword phrase right after the opening tag inside an <H1>or <H2> tag and a variation of the primary keyword right at the end of your web page before the closing tag. Reference the sample template to see how we did it.
Engine algorithms prioritize the first text on a page. The listing you see in the search engine results often uses the text found right after the tag opens. So you want to write not only keyword rich content but you also want to write compelling copy in case the text is picked up in the search engine results.
A complementary technique which brings this idea of pushing keyword rich content to the top of your web page is the idea of setting up your html tables to shift your top and left navigation below the main content in the source code even though on the screen it appears before the first headline.
Set up tables as best if you can to shift navigation below main content: If you are still using solely tables, you can try a hack to set up your tables with an empty upper left column so that when search engine bots crawl the site, they will crawl the keyword rich body of page before the navigation. (Instead of investing time to do this, get some CSS help).
If this is confusing then let me explain a little further. What you see on the screen is not exactly the same as the "source code" of a page. The source code includes all the html commands (like <STRONG>, <FONT size=+0>,<A href="">, and etc…), the CSS references and the Javascript references. By coding your page with CSS markup and utilizing something called Absolute and Relative Positioning, you can manipulate how your content is ordered on the page in terms of the source code versus how it looks on screen.
To see how you can use CSS and Javascript to make cleaner and more optimized web pages that will improve your rankings see this example at:
External File Referencing Advanced CSS Strategies
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