Where’s Your Content?

Quick thought (on a Sunday)… something for you to take a look at on your website: where’s your content lie, physically, within your code?

[tag]Search engines[/tag] are linear in the way they read HTML… that is, they go from top to bottom. Some spiders even have a per-page character limit they’ll gather. That means, if your content is buried deep within your page’s code, the spiders are having to do a lot of digging to get there. Not ideal. All too often, I run into sites exactly like this – where the content is good, but it’s buried 100+ lines deep in their code.

Ultimately, if you do find your content is buried within level upon level of table structure, etc. the best recourse is to talk to your design team about either changing your site’s layout or coding to reduce the amount HTML you use. Consider switching to a CSS based layout where you can basically position your body copy anywhere you want both on the page and within your site’s code.

For now, see if you can include a summary sentence right after your BODY tag. This is also a good chance to use a friendly tagline to immediately engage visitors!

[update] It’s been noted that this site’s content doesn’t start until line 180 something… good point! My desire to stick with WordPress instead of coding the site myself initially made me just pass on acting on my own advice. But… I’ve now put a sentence at the top of the right navigation element, placing a sentence of targeted copy on line 59 of my code.

[tags]seo for coders,content development,seo coding,SEO code[/tags]

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2. Syndicated Content “Duplicate”?
3. SEO in 30 Days, Day 13: Defining Page Topics, Part 1
4. SEO in 30 Days, Day 15: Writing Lead-Generating Content
5. Is Traditional SEO Dead?