Left side Navigation Menu's not good for SEO

Hi all,

My SEO consultant told me today that top and left navigation bars are not good for on page SEO. Rationale being, the higher in the code structure the content is, the better. I have also found this quote on the web which explains the same thing:

Further explanation given by my consultant:
Googles index has 2 fields: the first one containing 255 characters, and the second contains the whole page. In the first field, google puts the first 255 text characters from a page, and it is this field that is given priority when looking for results quickly (they want to give quick results). They will only go to the second field (the remaing page content) when not many good results are found in the first field. Therefore, if you have top and left navagation, the first field quickly gets filled up with text from these bars, instead of text from your content.

If you click 'cached' in a google search result, then click 'Click here for the cached text only.' you will see the text google reads, and its order on a page.

It makes logical sense to me BUT .....

I thought Google was smarter than that, the meta tags must mean something as well, and surely they know the difference between a navigation bar and content to make sure they rank based on content???

Can you share any expertise? Is it really worth ditching the left menu bar to gain the extra google points??

Thanks for your comments,
Dave

 

Well you can have left navigation and content still comes first

 

So it does make a difference?

Please give some hints on how to code this?

Thanks iatbm.

 

Well I don't know if it makes the difference or not but just in case I try to put content first on my websites. I use float:left and right to make it work

 

You can use CSS to order the content blocks, this is really old news

 

thats where an H1 and H2 tag comes in handy. header tag is effective because it usually comes ahead of your body content and you nav bar. so you put keyword and related description in H1 and H2 tag and make sure your nav bar has texts related to your page content. besides, google doesn;t assing ranking based on one or 2 crawls. after few crawls, google will know yor page content anyways

 

Another way you can use a left menu and still have your main content come first is the use of a blank table cell. Then the second cell in that table row is your content in a cell using rowspan=2.

<table><tr><td></td><td rowspan=2>main content</td></tr><tr><td>menu code</td></tr></table>

 

I'd avoid H1, it's a proven fact that H1 doesn't have any influence on ranking while H2-6 have, but in general you are right

 

Proven fact ? Oh really ? Where and when ?

 

Exactly... avoid h1 eh?

 

i noticed a big change in SERP when i added a H1 tag

 

you can just split the left hand column into two rows. leave the top one blank and just use it as a spacer. The main content will then be before the navigation.

 

Is this really true? I have always been under the impression that the first h1 tag in your markup can be quite influential in terms of rank. Obviously you should only a single h1 tag per page.

Daniel