Content position... does it matter?

Marketing
1

Hi all, not sure where to post so any help or advice thanks in advance :slight_smile:

As you can see from the below, the 3 column floating left structure most people use. My point is, I have most of my SEO keywords and content inside <sidenotes>, which as you can see will get rendered last.

<navbar></navbar> | <content></content> | <sidenotes></sidenotes>

Now, I’ve seen many sites with the below structure, where people add a float:right or a large margin-left to the <sidenotes> so they display the same as the above but get rendered first:

<sidenotes></sidenotes> | <content></content> | <navbar></navbar>

when viewed in the browser
<navbar></navbar> | <content></content> | <sidenotes></sidenotes>

Questions

  1. Why do people do this?
  2. Does it have any effect on the SEO side of things?
  3. Will this have any effect on the way google/SE index my content?
  4. I realized that my google ads display better related ads when I use the second approach, because my ads are placed inside <content> and the key words have already been picked up, is that why?

Any views on this? :cool:

2

There are varying schools of thought on this.

One focuses on accessibility. For people using assistive technology, and who have to run through the page in the order it is in the source (or by following internal links), it makes a lot of sense to have the content before the navigation - it is much more likely that the visitor wants to read the content than navigate to another page. Therefore, putting the content before the navigation will make it easier for this group of people to use your site.

(There is a contra-argument, which is that as it has become the de facto standard to have navigation before content, that is what people have become used to. For people who can’t visually scan the page, it may be more important to conform to the structural model they expect than to have a less intuitive format even if it ought to meet their needs better. I have crossed swords with Alex on this before (!), and I think it suffices to say that if you use skip links to good effect, it doesn’t really matter whether your navigation or content comes first)

The other main consideration is for SEO. Search engines only index a certain amount of content on any one page. In 2006, Sitepoint did an experiment to test this, and found that Google would index the first 520KB of a page. It’s unlikely that you will exceed that unless you are putting an entire book into a single HTML page! And so, the theory went, the higher up the page your text is, the better the page will rank for that text. I have seen no evidence to support this theory, nothing to suggest that search engines give preference or attach greater importance to text that appears near the top, and I certainly don’t think that the few lines needed to put the navigation in place would make any difference. Google are smart, and their spiders aren’t going to be confused by whether a page starts with navigation or goes straight into the content.

3

Cheers Stevie, well explained thank you :cool:

I have crossed swords with Alex on this before (!), and I think it suffices to say that if you use skip links to good effect, it doesn’t really matter whether your navigation or content comes first)
So really, it’s a matter of personal preference until there’s some solid evidence that one way is better than the other, but as you say “use skip links to good effect” and it shouldn’t matter, though I have seen a lot of big sites using the content first method. And would I be right in saying it’s predominately used for accessibility reasons?

Slightly off topic, my last question: Do you think it has an effect on the Google ads being displayed on the page?