Search engines and Web design

Link: http://kvcindia.com/blog

Moving text to the top
From a search engine optimization perspective, the perfect webpage has no graphics, no javascript code, no tables; it uses no special plug-ins and contains a lot of normal, readable text.

From a designer’s point of view such pages are, however, painfully boring. We need that logo! Illustrations liven up the page and tables give you control over the layout.

If it is in any way possible, include you keyword phrases in normal text at the very top of the page, using a relatively small font size if necessary. If your design does not allow that, do at least include the phrase in image ALT-tags. Reduce the number of images and elements before the main body text as much as possible.

Readers are used to having the navigation menu to the left of the page. However, if you put the menu in the left hand column of a table, all the text in that column will appear before the regular text in the HTML code.

Follow up:

There are several ways of solving this problem. The page you are looking at presents one solution (move the navigation list to the right).

The design of our Goalgetter Web Search Tutorial is another. If you look carefully at the code behind those pages, you'll see that the text in the left hand column appears after the main center column text in the HTML code!

You may also use CSS and position webpage elements by exact positioning. However, it is difficult to make such pages look good in all relevant browsers.