Hey, I know that it is important to have your keywords near the top of the page so with a new site I am doing I am going to try and make a css layout that allows for my main content to be near the top of the page like so (below is really simplified): <div id="maincontent"> blah blah blah main content </div> <div id="sidenav"> side nav here </div> <div id="header"> Header here, will be at top </div> Code (markup): Now in the HTML they are out of order by the main content (the content I want read by the search engines first is at the top) I would plan on positioning the elements absolutely so that the design would actually look like a website. My question is, is this worth it? (cause it's a pain to do ) and it seems to me like you could just pack all your keywords into a div and position the div off where no one will see it to manipulate Google, doesn't Google have the ability to track things like that?
How do you know this? I've seen this theory repeated many times, but I've yet to see some hard evidence. I wouldn't bother trying to do this, but that's just my opinion. I doubt that search engines look at this.
I don't know for sure, that's why I'm asking, it makes sense though that Google would consider text near the top of the page more relevant, many people think this is true but I've never seen any evidence that it's true or how important it is. Any other viewpoints on this, I think I agree with you, it's probably not worth doing.