Posted by gator on October 24, 2010 at 3:03pm
I am trying to understand drupal seo. My first question concerns the initial front page of a site. Right now my front page www.bestinstpetersburg.com has 3 columns. It seems to me that when I read about seo in general that content is extrememly important and that google 'reads' from the top of the page down.
Is it better to have a static front page for seo? Right now center column on my front page is comments posted.
So I guess what I am asking is what is the best layout for seo on the frontpage. It seems like a static front page would be best.
Thanks in advance for any help.
Comments
what do you mean by a static
what do you mean by a static front page?
nothing will help you with seo, unless you have good quality content.
analyze how your visitors are arriving at your site from search engines, which posts are doing better with google, etc.
create some helpful info that your visitors will like.
it's not the amount, but in original content.
some keyword research in your niche will also help you create those posts.
If you're worried about the layout, don't be. The bots can find the content perfectly fine in drupal in what ever layout, specially if it's good content.
But if you feel too concern, it may help to have the navigation to the right and the content on the left, so it shows first. However this is only for tables and some divs. If your div is placed after the node content and uses the "float to the left" then you can still keep the navigation on the left and your content will be crawled first anyways.
But like i said, layouts are secondary, as long as your users are happy with it
static
By static I mean when a vistor goes on the site the content information about the site basically remains the same instead of having the fornt page listing comments from users that changes continualy.
Non-static content
Google gives some preference to new and fresh content. Having a front page that is never updated will lead Google to think that your content is 'stale' and both crawl your site less as well as rank it lower in in the search results.
Ideally you want some dynamic content on the front page together with some static keyword-rich content that presents a reasonable cross-section of what your site is about. It doesn't necessarily have to be comments but maybe snippets of new articles etc. New comments are nice though because they usually link to the commented content and hence give Google a quick way to crawl your most interesting (to users) content - I presume here that users will comment more on content that's interesting and relevant to them. Ideally you want to tell Google about all your good content with the XML Sitemap module but links from the front page lead to the best and newest content in an automatic way for both users and search engine bots. Just make sure you don't overdo it or your front page will take too long to load.
-Daniel
Urbo
@kerberos my thoughts
@kerberos
my thoughts exactly
static pages are so 90s...
query needs freshness! ;)
Agreed, but I do think it is
Agreed, but I do think it is important to have some keyword rich text on your home page. I tend to lean towards the above idea of having a couple hundred words of static text that contain my main keywords along with dynamic content that is fresh. Kind of a happy medium approach that seems to work well for me.
Simon Vreeswijk,
Stikky Media | SEO Drupal
thanks Kerberos
thanks, I am very new at this so many questions to follow as I piece it together for myself.
Hi from St. Pete
Hi Gator,
Are you living in St. Pete. We have a recently active Drupal users group in the area with about a dozen members. I think that you would find the connection helpful. If you want to find out more, get in touch with me at harryc@harryc.net.
Harry