Does the positioning of the text on a webpage matter for search engines?

[HMK-NL]

Does the positioning of the text on a webpage matter for search engines?

Do you need to place the text at the upperside of a webpage or is at the bottom also a good option?

[HMK-NL]

Dear all,

thanks for replying. Is it a good idea to use jquery sliders on the top of your page to still get all your text above the fold and score in search engines?

for example:

http://www.wolf-howl.com/wp-content/uploads/after-slider.jpg is much better

than

http://www.wolf-howl.com/wp-content/uploads/before-slider1-310x1024.jpg

??

Thanks again!

[ninjaprecision]

Make sure that you're doing all you can to categorize your content. H1/H2/H3, paragraph tags, etc. I can't say exactly how they do it, but from experience it appears that crawlers are pretty good about judging where your main messages are placed. And of course, as Matt Cutts has explicity said again and again, good content trumps SEO. Not sure I believe him 100% though.

[gtrotter666]

Yeah, it's in situations like this that I find it a bit beguiling to be told to build for humans.  If Google were as smart as humans, then I would agree but until then it seems to be a case of "build for both".  Where do we draw the line between building for Google's computer like flaws and building to manipulate rankings........

[EGOL]

I know what you mean.

I spend a lot of time doing stuff for google that I would not do otherwise.

[gtrotter666]

This aspect has been exercising my brain recently.  It bothers me slightly that Google seems to treat "content" as synonymous with "text".  This create real problems for many e-commerce sites where people are not visiting to read......they want to "see" and then buy.

One of my websites sells printed greetings cards.  The actual board, size etc of cards is pretty uniform across our range so the cards really only differ by how they look.  Images are therefore hugely important and tell the user pretty much everything they need to know about the card.  They are the number one important aspect for that product.  Therefore to create the best user experience the images need to be number one priority.  However if I want Google to love my page and return it for queries relating to that card then I need to provide a textual description.  Ideally prominently on the page (since the Page Layout Algo etc).  But I know humans don't need that explanation because everything they need to know is contained in the image information.  So I am then forced to write a description not for my users but for Google.  I know we are supposed to build sites for people not engines but I can't see any other way of having Google love my page except to write something pretty much exclusively for Google.

Sorry for the slightly "ranting" nature of this but it does bother me.  Not only do I have to write descriptions for Google (unique for each card) but now I need to make them more prominent in the misguided belief that humans want them!

Gary

[EGOL]

I think that the position can be highly significant.

What if the relevant text is in a paragraph in the body of an article.   That should be more significant than text in the footer.

And, wouldn't you think that a link in the top navigation would be more significant than a link in the footer?

[Matthew_Edgar]

Hi,

The position of (main) text on the page doesn't affect the indexing or crawling of that page. From a user's standpoint, you probably want to position the text higher on the web page to make it easier to read. When it comes to choosing the position, I'd go with what makes the most sense for the overall design of your site.

If you meant the location of the text inside the HTML of the page, I don't think that really matters. Good coding practices would keep the HTML as simplistic as possible and put the content in a logical location. But that is more about coding practices, not SEO; I've seen sites with really sloppy HTML get crawled and indexed.

Hope that helps!