First Sentence of Body Text

[Cyanide]

Over the years I've been lead to believe that the first sentence of the body text is more important in SEO than other parts of the body text. Having recently remade one of our sites, I've noticed that the search engine is seeing the left hand panel as the first sentence in the body text. Is there any way to make it look at the middle cell which is where the main content is first? I don't want it to completely ignore the left hand panel, just not pick it up as the main content. I'm sure I've read this is a SEO book before but I can't remember which one for the life of me.

Cheers,
Mike

[thirdlight]

Google "middle column first css" and you'll find some beauties!

[moredial]

To clarify. The first 1024 characters of indexed content are the most important.

This starts with the TITLE and the other META content in the head. If there are any characters left, the first indexible content in the BODY is taken into account.

Characters are taken in the same order as they appear in the code. If you want other content taken first, you have to put that code before the content you do not want to promote.

Most layouts are created by people who have no idea about search engine algorithms and dump what you want search engines to index down in the bottom quarter of the code without taking into account that the database is of finite size and once it is full the rest of the content is ignored. Recent database upgrades indicate that this limit is now over the old 'about 40 - 80 Mb, keep less than 25 Mb to be safe' limit.

PM me with your domain url and other info (html or script?) and I will have a quick look to see how easily your layout can be tweaked to but the main content higher up in the code sequence.

[hooperman]

Originally Posted by moredial To clarify. The first 1024 characters of indexed content are the most important.

Where did you get that number from moredial? Do you have a related reference I could read?

[Rynert]

Originally Posted by hooperman Where did you get that number from moredial? Do you have a related reference I could read?

I was going to ask the same thing...

The SEs read the whole page (assuming the crawler stays that long) and indexes the words on that page with frequency and importance - derived by <h1> etc tags, bold, italics, bullet lists and so on.

[tbp]

Yes, but keywords towards the top of the page are marked as having more importance than text lower down the page (and have seen this from my own experiments).

If you have a huge left menu with a load of links, it pushes the content right down the page.

This is one of the problems with table based layouts, and CSS layouts do tend to be much better, as you can put your content first, then the left and right columns, and still have it display in the normal way.

If the page in general isn't that great, then overall it makes little difference. However, if you have the page optimized to the hilt, putting the content first can be ramp your page up the results by more notches.

[hooperman]

I can't see a reason why a sophisticated search engine would place more importance on phrases that appear near the top of the page. Writing styles differ from person to person and some people don't place important text near the top. Newspaper bulletin style writing places important information near the top but creative, fictional writing doesn't. In giving more importance to phrases that appear near the top, the latter writing style would suffer. I don't think any competent programmer would code something as clumsy as that.

But, I'm open to changing my mind if I see some good proof

Originally Posted by tbp Yes, but keywords towards the top of the page are marked as having more importance than text lower down the page (and have seen this from my own experiments).

Tell me, how were you able to isolate the influencing variables in your experiment. A difficult task given that you cannot even identify them all the variables that a search engine uses.

[tbp]

Tell me, how were you able to isolate the influencing variables in your experiment. A difficult task given that you cannot even identify them all the variables that a search engine uses.

Basically, by swapping the layout of the page round in terms of code, putting the center column first, and changing nothing else. The page was then left and watched, and I saw jumps in the rankings.

It makes sense really if you think about it. Google is trying to make their spider read the page in a more "Humanlike" way.

If you take a look at the page source, then having the minimum of HTML, then solid blocks of your content text, and then left menu links etc gives you the relevant info straight away. The most important part of the page the content is easily accessible at the top and can be read straight away. And before anyone says that humans wouldn't look at the page source, this would be exactly the way it would be seen by a blind person using a screen reader. (Which is how I tend to treat the spiders)

[Rynert]

Originally Posted by tbp It makes sense really if you think about it. Google is trying to make their spider read the page in a more "Humanlike" way.

I know that shifting your DIVs around is a good idea to prevent menus / header navigation etc being the 'snippet' in the SERPs, but for your average page (i.e. not one sooo long that the crawler never gets to the end) would it really make a difference?

Devils advocate : So the 'conclulsion' to any report / story / article - the summing up, the authors concise conclusion, is given the least weight?

[tbp]

So the 'conclulsion' to any report / story / article - the summing up, the authors concise conclusion, is given the least weight?

I don't think that crosses over onto the web. There are billions of articles on the web, and people don't want to have to read the whole of each article, to get to the last paragraph, "the conclusion" to find the info they want. If you had to do that, you`d have to read a hell of a lot of text to find the info you're after.

One the net, people want the information they are looking for fast! They tend to read the first paragraph, and if that doesn't include the info their looking for, or a very strong indication that if they read on they`ll find it, they`ll leave and read something else!

How many times have you gone to a web page, and the first couple of paragraphs haven given you the info you're after, so you`ve left?

Because of the vast amount of info on the web, the importance is finding what you want quickly.

This is one of the reasons why the text in the first <h1> tag on the page has such a high weighting.

In the end you do what you think is right. I`m convinced that my info is correct, it puts 90% of my sites in the top 3 results in google. If you don't agree with this, you don't have to do it

[Rynert]

Heh, i was playing Devils Advocate

I was more interested in the 1024 characters bit from the other poster...