We have received a number of emails with questions regarding the best practices in SEO page design. This article is a review of one of the best, in our opinion, SEO layout examples that we have found on the web. Follow this link – http://www.strictlycss.com/examples/three-column-layout-3.asp – to get the visual presentation of what we are going to be talking about for the rest of this post.

We hope that everybody has come to understand by now that SEO, in most cases, is all about keeping things simple. Although every major search engine has been and will be working non-stop on improving their indexing algorithms, we cannot expect them to be able to catch up with all the innovations that come to the web.

Separating content from navigation or recovering it from table cells, these days, is not that much of a problem for any decent search engine. Crawling forms, reading PDFs and looking into JavaScript is something that they are trying to progress in now. And while they become so scary-good in such advanced areas and get any additional piece of information presented on a web page, the most important thing for success of your site is still the ol’good text. And that is what you should always bet on – making your text accessible, clearly structured and crawlable.

The following page structure is what has proven to be the best content presentation order:

Page Title > Content > Main Menu > Additional Navigation > Footer

But wouldn’t it be boring if all pages looked the same, layout wise? Sure thing, it would! But thanks to elements that can be positioned with the help of simple CSS mapping whichever way we like, one can have various visual design without breaking the actual above-mentioned order. You can check out the examples and look up the page source to see how visual presentation is different from the real order of elements within the HTML code.

One should keep in mind that when Google derives page descriptions (a.k.a. page snippets) displayed along with page titles in search results, part of the text from the bottom of a page may be used as well. So, it may be a good idea to alternate text within the footer section for every page of your site. It is not crucial, but may help increase response rates from the people browsing search results.

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