As you may know, your search engine rankings, largely depend on relevant, quality backlinks (related sites that link to you.)
However, when it comes to less competitive keywords (which make up the majority of my search engine traffic for all my sites), your content and other on-page criteria may have more influence in certain cases.
So it’s still important to make sure your pages are as optimized as possible, and this includes ensuring that your source code displays your main content as close to the top of the page as possible.
The problem is, most CSS templates (static websites and blogs) are not coded this way by default. Check the source code of your site (right click and View Source on your page.) If you have a left nav, I bet that content comes up before the main content.
Just to experiment, I changed Flat Stomach Exercises last August. Now the content displays right after my header in my code.
Shortly after this change, my search engine traffic grew dramatically and I haven’t updated the content in over a year. I also haven’t actively promoted this site in several years.
Coincidence? Could be. I’ll never know for sure.
It would be very irresponsible for me to assume this change was the sole reason. Please read that last sentence again because the last thing I want to do is mislead you.
Nevertheless, why wouldn’t you want your content to appear as close to the top of the page if you understand how search engine bots read web pages. (They view the source code from top to bottom.) To me, it just make sense to make this change.
This is especially true for those of you with long, busy navigations with a lot of links, ads, etc.
And even if it only moves your pages up a few spots in the rankings, multiply that impact by hundreds or even thousands of different keyword phrases your site gets found for every month. Think about it.
This tip is probably not going to impact your rank for most competitive keywords, but could have the greatest impact on long-tail (less competitive) keywords. I don’t know about you, but long-tail keywords make up the majority of my search engine traffic.
Watch the video below and tell me what you t
Can’t see the video? Click to watch.
This is one mistake i have been doing. thank you for that hint
Hello, i read your blog occasionally and i own a similar one and i was just wondering if you get a lot of spam
feedback? If so how do you stop it, any plugin or anything you can advise?
I get so much lately it’s driving me insane so any support is very much appreciated.
Great article, however could I not simple have a template.php file and then code my content pages individually and simply call the template.php file to each page? So rather than having lines upon lines of code to have sit above my content or below my content its simply something to the effect of what I show below. That way GoogleBot will crawl my nearly shapeless site seeing 99% content only right up from and the browser see that it needs to format that content according to the template.php file?
HTML
HEAD
META DATA/
php include
/HEAD
TITLE /TITLE
BODY CONTENT
CONTENT
/BODY
/HTML
thank you lisa
Awesome post great tips you have provided.Looking ahead to follow your tips.Thanks for sharing
Optimized code works wonders! Forget about those who boast with so many lines of code. Why bother when you can get what you need with just a few witty lines.
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What do you think of these articles?
http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/52335/source-code-ordering
http://john.albin.net/content-first-source-order
It seems there is no difference in results and there might be some penalties or confusion on readability .
I’ve implemented this before and it’s easy to do it. However, I’m no sure if it made an impact on my results. So, I’m wondering if in fact has an impact on SEO.