Free Website Promotion, Website Traffic, and SEO Tips

Most websites use tables to create a menu on the left hand side of the page. This does give a nice look and feel to the page and is generally a good design decision.

However, when a Search Engine spider comes to the website it will read the text from the left hand menu before it reads the text from the main page. Due to the fact that most Search Engines consider words at the beginning of a page more important than words used later in the page, this means that your menu item text will have an impact on your Search Engine optimization.

There are several ways to deal with this.

1. Don’t worry about it.

The truth of the matter is that most Search Engines are probably smart enough to differentiate between a menu and the main body text.

2. Use DIVs to move the text to the top of the page.

This technique is becoming more common. But if you search through the top results of highly competitive keywords you will find that most of those sites are using tables and not DIVs. The process of doing this with DIVs is beyond the scope of this book. DIVs also load faster than tables. However, I don’t recommend that beginners worry about changing their websites to use DIVs. Your time would be better spent doing keyword research, adding quality content to your website, and getting more links to your website.

3. Using a simple table trick (described below).

Below is an example of how a typical website table looks with a left menu:

Here is the HTML used for the sample above:

The content of the Left Menu appears above the main body text in the HTML code (seen above). In this case a Search Engine might consider the text in the left menu more important than the main body text.

The above HTML can be improved for Search Engine optimization purposes, by using the ‘Rowspan’ attribute.

Here is an example of the optimized HTML:

In the code above, the main body text comes before the left menu text. Below you can see that the optimized page looks the same as it did before:

This technique can be used to help the Search Engines understand which text is more important. I believe that Search Engines will soon be able to tell the difference between the menu text and main body text (if they can’t already). Which is why I believe this technique probably isn’t necessary (I don’t use it). However, I thought I should mention it since it might help.