Alright, Im working on a new design for my site, and I needed to ask this. For search engines, is it best to have the menu on your site on the right or left hand side? My site is an anime streaming site, and i will more than likely have a big list of anime titles down one of the sides, and I was curious as to which search engines like better. Thanks!
Left or Right doesn't matter, the best method is to view "both" styles with a GoogleBot spoofer to see where they fall in order on the page. Since GoogleBot follows URL in order they render in.
It doesn't matter where the menu appears on the browser - you want it to appear before your content so that the pages in your site get indexed. Some will claim that having the content before the menu hurts, but the truth is it can actually hurt if your Web page is really large since the search engines would have to go through the page content to get to the menu links. And if they can't get to those links because of all that content, then you're SOL up the creek without a paddle before going over the falls. What I do with my sites is I put the header (which contains an image for the site's logo) first, followed by a search form (if present) and the menu, then the content, followed by any sidebars (I don't consider menus to be sidebars, even though they CAN appear on the side - I'm talking about ad skyscrapers and extra pertinent info here, among other things) and the footer. Of course, I also use CSS to place these elements where i want them, but the search engines by and large could care less about my stylesheets.
What Im looking at having, actually, is a layout similar to yours, however, the "menu" is a long list of anime titles. http://www.animeakiba.com is my current layout, imagine all the "most popular" and what not just to be a big list of anime titles, that link to their content. There wont be much more on the homepage than what you already see, I think.