Layout and SEO considerations

[pschoenb]

Hello,

my layout consists of a header containing no text and a three column layout. The left and right columns are implemented as floats. This forces me to place the {content} tag almost at the end of my HTML template.

Now, search engines prefer that keywords appear within the first sentence. The first text found is my menu, though. Is there any way to get the actual page content more to the front of the template while keeping the layout? Or is there any other way to increase the importance of the keywords mentioned in the page text?

[Mantlet]

Hi pschoenb,

Using CSS you can solve this by positioning your header with "absolute". That way you can drag your header all the way up, even when the code is all the way to the bottom. Use something like this:

Code: Select all

</__body>
<div class="container">
   <div class="content"><h1>{title}</h1>{content}</div>
   <div class="menu">{menu}</div>
</div>
<__body>

css:

Code: Select all

.menu {
   position: absolute;
   height: 250px;
   top: 0px;
}
.content {
   position: relative;
   top: 250px;
}

Ive used this principle for the website http://www.hanson.nl with this complete css: http://www.hanson.nl/opmaak.css

Have a look, hopefully this helps.

[spike]

You may want to have a look at this - it's a three column holy grail 213 layout which puts the center column (content column at the top of the tree) great for SEO. I've been using it in modified fixed width form for some time now and it made a lot of difference to my SEO indexing.

Also easy to modify for two column use.

http://matthewjamestaylor.com/blog/ulti ... pixels.htm