The Absolute Positioning Technique - The loading sequence

Continuing on from my posts on the benefit of absolute positioning getting the content and all those beneficial keywords and phrases in front of the search engines spiders instead of being lost in heavy code and giving up. Today's post will have you consider the ‘order’ in which the certain ‘content blocks’ appear in the source code. It is well understood that cross browser programming remains a challenge to this day which can also restrict the extreme use of positioning.

Our goal is simple - move the main content up to the very top of the source code.

This search engine optimisation technique called ‘absolute positioning’ is to avoid search engine crawlers visiting the website but not indexing the low positioned content.

Absolute positioning will allow clients to write pages in the order required to maximise the likelihood of search engines spiders crawling the source code and to provide control over the order of content elements appearing in the visitor’s browser when accessing the various sections of the client website. The recommended order of delivery:

Loading 1st
- Main Body Content

Loading 2nd
- Keyword Footer

Loading 3rd
- Navigation Menu

Loading 4th
- Image Files

Absolute positioning is done through the use of <DIV> tags and classes inside the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) files. The blocks are given sizes (through width and height) and are placed at either a set distance from the top left hand corner of the page or a parent <DIV> tag which contains all the visual elements of the page. Absolute positioning can still be done in pages that have their content in the middle of the page rather than resting on the left hand side of the browser.

Absolute Positioning - giving your content a lift up

The higher your content is on a given page the more it counts for Google. Google does not see a page like a human being, Googlebot crawls the code. Thus the higher your content is in the code the better. So if you have a complex site with lots of menus, scripts and other gimmicks you should consider absolute positioning, otherwise Google might even stop crawling your page before it reaches the main content. You can place the actual content high up in the code, at the top, while the users will see it in the middle of the page below the menus.