I have a simple fixed width 2 column layout with a masthead and a footer. Masthead isn’t too large, but there is an unordered list and my logo applied to it. I am aware that people like to pull there content as high up in the HTML outputted code as best as possible, however, is it recommended to go above the masthead to achieve better search rankings or would this be a negligent procedure?

At the current moment, here is the order:

1 - Masthead
2 - Content
3 - Right Column
4 - Footer

Legend has it that you need to get content as close to the top as possible, but I’m not convinced it makes that much difference. I’d be very surprised to see any noticeable improvement in your search results if you switched 1 and 2 around - certainly most of the layouts I do are similar to the one you detail above.

I personally believe that content is king and layout is just a vehicle to get that content across to the end user. Yes it is important that your layout is laid out preferably as semantically as possible but as long as you adhere to the basic rules there then you should be fine. Remember that a search engine has no idea of what it is seeing other than content and most of the time it will strip out the relevant parts of a page anyway.

If you have good content mixed with relevant phrases in your titles and relevant inbound links from related sites then you should do okay.

I’ve designed sites in many ways and have never really noticed a difference due to design implementations between them.

Best wishes,

Mark

Thanks for the quick replies guys. I was beginning to worry.. Just want to get this done right since I’ve been killing so much time into doing it.. For once, I don’t feel like I’m scrapping together a site, and that’s thanks to EE and all of you guys!

Another important aspect is accessibility. The structure of the outputted HTML can be important for screen reader users etc, try turning off CSS in your web browser to see if it makes sense. As it is a typical Header/Nav/Content/Extra/Footer structure seems to work fine for everyone.