I am getting ready to do a redesign of one of my sites. I have been reading some article on creating a seo friendly site and have read some conflicting information. One article said navigation should always be on the left hand side, the other article said to avoid the left hand side and if you had to use the left hand site you should place keywords above the navigation. What are your thoughts? Of course I am redesigning the site for better navigation for my users but would like to keep my current rankings and improve them.
The side of the navigation will not make much difference IF you design the site in that way that the content sits BEFORE the sidebar. Thats what those article speak about. Example 1: You want the sidebar to be on the RIGHT side of your layout, so you have div for content and div for sidebar, if you float both (content and sidebar) divs to left you will have to position to content div as closer to the body as possible. I.e. <body><div id="content">content</div><div id="sidebar">sidebar</div></body> Don't know if I got to the point.
if you do put the side bar on the left, it's best practice to make a table in the top left corner and leave it empty, that way the search engine will skip your side bar and read the content (centre) region of your site, and it also means google would place the highest paying adsense on the one within your content (centre)