Does a website have to have content on top of the page?

Question

SEO, Search Engine Question:

My news site is currently layed out like so:
Top to bottom:
1) Logo + banner ad
2) PDF of the newspaper + Opinion poll + Search box
3) News stories!
4) Index bar

Is it a problem (for the search engine crawlers) if the first thing they see when they scan the page is pdf's and polls? News stories don't show up until about 30% of the way down the page.

I noticed that the search engines don't update my page that often even thought I totally update my site every thursday (with about 90% new content).

What is wrong?

Answer 1

remember, search engines don't see CSS. So, why not do this, put the content in a div, and the ads in a div. Place the content at the top of the html page, but display it below the ads when shown in the browser.



html page:



header...

content....

links...

downloads...

ads...



displayed on browser:



ads...

links...

downloads..

contents..



This is a simple way to get your content indexed differently then how it is displayed on the screen.



Also use google sitemaps to notify them of updates to your page:

http://www.google.com/webmasters and http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/



Good Luck

Answer 2

Content is king. The search engines rank your pages based on what the content on the page says about it as well as links pointing to the page. If the content changes all the time your ranking will change accordingly. See the site below for a lot of free info.

Answer 3

Good quality text content indexes best. If the search engines are not updating your site and you update that often, are you submitting your sitemap direct? Sounds like that is part of the equation which may be missing. We can help if you need it. 215-966-1462 http://www.jmbinteractive.com

Answer 4

Well, I think if you would like to better promote whatever it is that you are promoting you currently have a decent website, but content what help you out a lot more. I would much rather prefer to view your website than give you general information, but you should add some content just so that the viewers of your web page get a better idea of what you are promoting.

Answer 5

I think your ok with the content part way down the page. Just make sure that you archive all the older articles. Never delete. Here are some more tips: http://www.richkahmer.com

Answer 6

try meta tags like

keywords

description

refresh



this helped my site come to the top in a very shot time.