Keyword prominence offers two significant benefits. First, search engines assign greater value to keywords that appear early in the text. Second, some search engines build a synopsis or summary description of your Web site based on the first so-many characters or words they find on the viewable page.

Unfortunately, many Web site are designed to include navigation links down the left-hand side of the screen (we've all seen Web sites with a colored bar running down the left side with links to all the important areas). Typically, this side-bar navigation HTML is implemented in one or more table cells. This HTML almost always appears before the page's introductory text. This can interfere with the goal of putting critical sentences and keywords near the top of the Web page.

For example, a site that uses a left side navigation bar might have a confusing summary in search engines like:

MORTGAGE ASSISTANCE CORP: Home View our catalog Help Search the site Contact us About us Welcome to the online catalog...

You can see that the search engine synopsis above included very few useful keywords and is not at all helpful to anyone using the search engine. Employing a meta description tag solves this problem but only for search engines that support the tag. Here's an example of a properly constructed meta description tag:

<meta name="description" content="Put your page summary description here.">

The content included in the meta description tag above will be displayed as the summary text or site synopsis in many search engines.

Remember, for top search engine rankings, targeted keywords that appear in the site's viewable text need to be found near the top of the HTML code as well. When using tables, a simple rearrangement of table cells can move the introductory text to the top of the HTML code without changing the screen layout. Below, a "dummy" cell is used before the introductory text instead of the list of links. The cell containing the introductory text uses "ROWSPAN=2" so that it spans the tiny dummy cell and the cell containing the links. In this example using our new technique, the cell containing the links now appears AFTER the all-important introductory text.

<TABLE>
<TR>
<TD><!--dummy cell to push links down--></TD>
<TD ROWSPAN=2 VALIGN=top>Welcome to the online catalog for polish sausage, italian sausage, kielbasa, and the finest german bratwurst. You can view our samples and order online right now!</TD>
</TR>
<TR>
<TD>
<A HREF="home.html">Home</A><BR>
<A HREF="cat.html">View our catalog</A><BR>
<A HREF="help.html">Help</A><BR>
<A HREF="search.html">Search the site</A><BR>
<A HREF="contact.html">Contact us</A><BR>
<A HREF="about.html">About us</A><BR>
</TD>
</TR>
</TABLE>

If you have more than one row containing navigation links, just increase the number of the ROWSPAN for the introductory text.

                 ← What is this?

---