Best placement of text on page

[LD]

I've added text descriptions to my links on my linklist in an effort to get more Google attention, but how important is the position of the text? Should it be high on the page...would it be best to have text before you have links or banners?

[Maj. Stress]

All over the page, starting at the top.

[NY Jester]

Id venture to say that text, good keyword text is better than no text, no matter where it is. But the closer to the top Ive bene told is better than the bottom?


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[tigermom]

It's good, but don't over SEO, is my advice. In my experience, there's no need for most of the on-page SEO anyway. Pages can rank very high without too many meta tags and alt tags. The most important thing is off-page SEO, namely a good pattern of incoming links with the right anchor text.

[Paul7]

In my experience the top the middle and the bottom is the best. Spread out your text and add also pictures banners in the empty spaces. Do not oversaturate your site with banners. You do not want to make a bannerfarm but a SEO targetter site

[LD]

Thanks for the answers folks.

[QxM]

close to the top is always good, you might want to use tableless designs with CSS which reduces the amount of code in the page.....

[lazyworkaholic]

How does Google know that a certain keyword is at the top? Does every word in a text gets a number and the same keyword with number 400 is less important than #40?

[LD]

Originally Posted by QxM

close to the top is always good, you might want to use tableless designs with CSS which reduces the amount of code in the page.....

Yes, I am working on that. I don't know if I can get rid of all the tables, but if I get it down to 1 or 2, should be an improvement. How do php statments/includes work? If I have a php statement on my index which pulls a list of links and descriptions, does Google only see the one php line? in that case I might be better off using a static list rather than a dynamic one..(?).

What I really want to do is move everything to Wordpress and have something along the lines of Ponygirls "blinklist" but I can't get my script to play well with Wordpress for now...

[ponygirl]

Originally Posted by LusciousDelight

Yes, I am working on that. I don't know if I can get rid of all the tables, but if I get it down to 1 or 2, should be an improvement. How do php statments/includes work? If I have a php statement on my index which pulls a list of links and descriptions, does Google only see the one php line? in that case I might be better off using a static list rather than a dynamic one..(?).

What I really want to do is move everything to Wordpress and have something along the lines of Ponygirls "blinklist" but I can't get my script to play well with Wordpress for now...

Luscious - I only have the main page on WP right now, all my category pages are still static html. I had to do an include for the main page, as I have link trades on there and couldn't change it to php, and was told that the SEs will see everything that the include pulls in.

I probably could integrate my category pages onto WP, but it just seemed to make sense to leave them as they were (due to the page extension problem) and so far this seems to work just fine, although there are a couple of minor glitches that I had to work around till I get to fixing them. I did have to play around with the WP css files to get it to look the same, but that wasn't too hard, I learned as I went. The best thing I did was to install a local server on my PC so I could test everything out before going live.

I really like being able to update the main page so easily, which is why I wanted to use WP in the first place.

If you need any help, let me know maybe I can point you in the right direction

[LD]

Originally Posted by ponygirl

Luscious - I only have the main page on WP right now, all my category pages are still static html. I had to do an include for the main page, as I have link trades on there and couldn't change it to php, and was told that the SEs will see everything that the include pulls in.

I probably could integrate my category pages onto WP, but it just seemed to make sense to leave them as they were (due to the page extension problem) and so far this seems to work just fine, although there are a couple of minor glitches that I had to work around till I get to fixing them. I did have to play around with the WP css files to get it to look the same, but that wasn't too hard, I learned as I went. The best thing I did was to install a local server on my PC so I could test everything out before going live.

I really like being able to update the main page so easily, which is why I wanted to use WP in the first place.

If you need any help, let me know maybe I can point you in the right direction

Cool, you've got one of the more innovative sites I've seen. You should probably trademark the name "blinklist" ...seriously.

Thing is, I want to be able to drop in my newest freesites, or premium sites in a sidebar widget which has php code which gets the info from the database. That's how I have it set up now, but ran into problems with Wordpress. They are looking into why it doesn't work...hopefully I'll get it set up soon. I too plan to leave all my category pages static, but I want the links to them in a sidebar widget named "categories".

Here's what I'm working on now...all f'd up but you can see how what I'm aiming for.

http://www.lusciousdelights.com/indexnew2.php


Wordpress just offers so much more in terms of moving stuff around and updating, like you say...and that's where I want to be. And if you get tired of looking at it, just drop in a new theme and presto, lovely new website. Also, it's cool to make post in the blog, maybe introduce a new sponsor, etc, etc. Such an easy way to add new stuff to a site. I already have my site on an "index.php" page, so my link trades should be fine.

I would be interested in knowing what you're using for a local server. Right now I'm doing the edit-upload-refresh routine.

[ponygirl]

for the local server, I use XAMPP - http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html, and WP actually has instructions on how to install into it - http://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/xampp/

that way you can play around with the css and whatnot, preview it and everything, before you upload it to your remote server. It's saved my butt a few times

I'm not really good with php yet, so I'm not really using as much functionality as I can with WP. I hard coded my category links, and the right sidebar is a mix of php and hardcoded. It's not perfect because I get that damned empty outline running along the bottom right side. (I have to keep screwing with my css I guess) The important thing to me was the ability to post, and some of the plugins are useful. I've seen some (small) good results from it, so hopefully if I keep updating regularly it'll help.

I hate the sidebar widgets, I never can seem to get them working right lol.

(oh and btw, blinklist is already floating around out there, just not for what we're doing, and I think Preacher is the first one I remember to integrate blog posts into a LL, so I'm not that original hehe )

[Useless]

Originally Posted by LusciousDelight

How do php statments/includes work? If I have a php statement on my index which pulls a list of links and descriptions, does Google only see the one php line?

SE bots see the end page in all of its glory. In other words, view the source code of your live page - that's what Googlebot sees. As long as you didn't screw up the include, the bot sees the included content, not the include statement.

By the way, say hello to Blinkist.

[LD]

Originally Posted by Useless Warrior

By the way, say hello to Blinkist.

I don't like that one near as much as Ponygirl's...

Thanks for all the info...

[MattatKaras]

Just a note on this topic :

I put some text inside quotes at the top of my index page to make it look like a quotation and google seems to have ignored it for my listing description and gone straight to the next bit of text.