Recently I did a review on a client’s Web site. We’d done the original SEO work over a year earlier, and the client had been maintaining the site themselves. They’re in a pretty competitive marketplace, but they are doing very well on some of their chosen key phrases, with many first page listings on our target search engines – Google, Yahoo! and MSN.
However, one of their key phrases wasn’t performing as we would predict. We had the key phrase densities right and the competition was not too tough. So what was happening?
You’ve possibly heard that search engines weight content at the top of the page more than that at the bottom. As someone who in the past has written news stories and press releases, I have the importance of getting the meat of the story (or sale) over quickly in my blood, so the claim seems plausible.
Trouble is, I’ve never seen any clear-cut evidence in any of our client sites – or my own sites, for that matter.
But, in this case, the section of copy containing the underperforming key phrase was right at the end of a reasonably long page. A closer look at the code underlying the page using Spidertest, showed that a heap of nested tables had been introduced into our CSS/XHTML templates. The tables, in turn, contain a lot of information.
It seems that the combination of page length, copy position on the page and old-fashioned HTML was causing the search engines to largely ignore the optimized copy that had been pushed right to the end of the page.
What an argument for getting the detailed work right if you want successful SEO.
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