This is part three in the “WordPress SEO For Beginners” series. If you haven’t read the first part on SEO permalinks, or the second part on SEO meta tags, I heartily suggest you do at some time.
After a search engine bot crawls visits your site and crawls through your head section containing the meta tags, it then proceeds to travel through your site. A lot of people aren’t aware of this, but the structure of your blog also plays a role in how well your site ranks in the search engines.
A common blog layout
A common WordPress blog layout
Above is a common layout seen on WordPress blogs. There is a “header” area at the top which usually contains the site’s name and some navigation links. The main content area which contains the published articles is below this and it is flanked on both sides by sidebar areas containing various widgets. And there’s a footer area below all of this which usually has copyright info and maybe some site navigation as well.
Search engines do not view your actual web pages; they view the underlying code. The web page’s content is indexed by search crawlers in the same way that it is coded. This most often means that the direction of flow is top to bottom and left to right.
The path through your site as it gets indexed
So in the above pictured layout, the search engine bot will index the content in this order:
- Header
- Left Sidebar
- Main Content Area
- Right Sidebar
- Footer
Why you should care about your layout
Search engines tend to place a higher value on content that is closer to the top of a page, and less on content as it nears the bottom. Content in the footer areas of web sites are notoriously bad areas to put important information as sometimes very little weight is given to them.
If there are equal amounts of content in the above diagrammed blog layout, then the fresh new content that is published on this blog would be situated in the middle of the code. The easy way to ensure that your content is placed higher in the layout is to not place sidebars on the left side of your pages.
For most of the blogs that I set up I only use one sidebar that is located on the right side, but if an additional sidebar is desired, then I place them both on the right side. By doing this the important content that I want to be viewed with importance is situated in the best possible place.
Final thoughts on blog layouts
Keeping the “prized” areas of your blog pages located in the best spots for the search engines should be a major consideration when setting up your blog. Keep sidebars to the right and you’ll be doing well!
Don’t miss the next article which will discuss the blog content!