All these things are 'within reason'. I have seen SEO agencies advise putting the main content immediately after <body> and then repositioning everything else with CSS into right places. This is likely not to be possible on some designs and Google is smart enough to sift through the initial junk on the page to get through to the main content also. There's another argument that says that your main navigation help Google index other pages on the site, so if you are putting that after the main content you are making deeper indexing of your site a little harder for Google, as it has to do more work to follow the links. Hence nothing is black and white here. Perhaps you should try both solutions for a while and see if it makes a difference. If you can't be bothered, I would go with 'regular source order', whatever that is for your site. Thanks, Jason PS: Also, if you need more SEO advice let me know.
On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 7:22 AM, Rob Enslin <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Caleb, > > I might be wrong but anecdotal evidence suggests order is not an 'issue' > for bots scanning your site. I'm other words by in large so long as your > code is structured correctly your <h1>, <h2> etc will be indexed > appropriately. > > The only caveat/exception is non-valid code. Also, long, heavy and bloated > code where important tag info is burried way down the page, can impact on > indexability - stuff that's simply not best practice. > > -- rob > // Rob Enslin > // twitter.com/robenslin > > > On 15 Apr 2009, at 06:21, Caleb Wong <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi, >> >> I have a SEO question regarding how search engines scans a website. Say >> for example if I have a site where it has a 3 column layout. >> Column left and column right appears before the middle column area, and >> within column left, right there are h2, h3 tags; within the middle column >> there is a h1 tag. >> >> The source code goes something like this... >> <column_right> >> <h2> >> </column_right> >> <column_left> >> <h2> >> </column_left> >> <column_middle> >> <h1> >> </column_middle> >> >> So would search engines pick up on the h1 header that appears at the >> bottom of the page, or picks up on the first header (regardless its weight) >> it sees. >> >> Cheers >> Caleb >> >> ******************************************************************* >> List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm >> Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm >> Help: [email protected] >> ******************************************************************* >> > > > ******************************************************************* > List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm > Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm > Help: [email protected] > ******************************************************************* > > -- Jason Grant BSc, MSc CEO, Flexewebs Ltd. www.flexewebs.com [email protected] +44 (0)7748 591 770 Company no.: 5587469 www.twitter.com/flexewebs www.linkedin.com/in/flexewebs ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [email protected] *******************************************************************
