Position Your Content Toward The Top of HTML Code

When the search engines look at your page, they don’t actually see the display version that you and I read. They read only the HTML behind the page. But they’re like us one key respect; they pay more attention to words at the top. They figure that is where the most important words will be.

What’s more, if there are two links on a page to the same target page,Google appears to only take the anchor text of the first into consideration when indexing.So by placing your content toward the top of the page of code, you ensure that the keywords and links within are properly taken into account when your pages are indexed.

It’s quite common for web developers to code pages such that elements like images, sidebars, JavaScript (including Google Analytics code) and even footers appear above content in the code.The page still displays correctly to visitors - just not to the search engines. This can bury your content 1000 words or more down the page of code. There’s absolutely no reason for this to happen. All of these elements can be coded after your content, especially if your developers are using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), as they should. Note that by placing your JavaScript toward the bottom of the page of code (e.g. before the </body> tag), you’ll make your page load faster for visitors and they won’t have to sit and wait for the code to run before the page displays. But there’s a trade-off. With your Google Analytics code loading late, it may not register all visits because people may leave quickly, closing the page before the Analytics code has finished running.