Once you’ve done SEO for a while you realize how unrealistic it is to expect Google to give a high ranking to pages that don’t contain any useful information – links or no links – and especially when the keywords in question are fairly competitive.

I was reminded of this over the last week or so by two websites I was asked to evaluate. One was produced by a very credible business involved in relatively high end online activities. Their site was made completely in Flash and had virtually no identifying text, headlines, titles or other useful metadata. From the search engine point of view there was no way to tell what it was about. Consequently they did not even rank for their own domain name – which was also their primary keyword.

The other was similar, except in this case the site had no serious content, and much of it was “under construction.” A site like that is basically useless and doesn’t deserve to get ranking.

My advice in both cases: create some readable content, follow two or three of the most basic SEO rules and your problems will be solved. We’ll see if they take the advice.

Here’s another post by Loren Baker along the same lines: Don’t Sour Your Link Juice By Forgetting Basic SEO.

Why? Because it is often the first thing read (after the header) by the SE spiders. Most of us who have done any SEO research have concluded that the content at the top of a page (main headline, first few paragraphs, first few links) establishes the theme of the page and tells the spiders what the page is about.

So we assume that most of our optimization efforts should be devoted to the text at the top of the page: put your desired keyword phrase in the main headline (h1), a number of times in the first couple of paragraphs or sentences, and possibly include it in an outbound link to another highly relevant page within your site.

But if you’ve got a navbar before your primary content (in the left column), then chances are you’ve got a bunch of different keywords and outbound links (to other pages in your site) that seriously dilute the focus of your page. This means that you are counting on your page title tag and headline in the header area to do all the heavy SEO lifting.

In his SEO manual called Confidential SEO Secrets Allen Harkleroad emphasizes this point. He says:

“After extensive testing I have discovered that left vertical navigation hinders search engine spiders and dilutes search result ranking.”

And he goes on to cite a 500 website test he ran in which he removed the left navigation bars from 250 of them. He concludes,

“Within a week I saw a substantial gain on the websites that I had removed the left vertical page navigation.”

Andy Jenkins of Stompernet in the video discussed a few posts back also mentions the negative impact of the left navigation bar. His point is slightly different. He points out that using a consistent nav bar thoughout all (or most of) your pages increases the likelihood that the SEs will see pages within your site as duplicate content. His suggestion is to turn the navbar into an image.

But this only partially addresses the “top of the page” SEO issue. Even if you turn it into an image, you will still have a bunch of outbound links right near the top of your page with varying anchor texts. This will still dilute the SEO impact of your page.

I started eliminating left nav bars at least three years ago for exactly this (SEO) reason. But there were some sites where I just assumed it was important to have a left nav bar, simply because that is what people are used to.

In particular, two of our most important retail sites still have left nav bars. As I said, I’ve assumed that putting that nav bar anywhere else on the page would have a negative impact on usability.

This assumption is probably not very well founded. As a test I just moved the left navbar on the home page of one of these sites over to the right site to see how it looks. Frankly I think it looks just as user-friendly that way. You can see it here – portable trade show displays. Tell me if you agree.

In fact, that is the way most blogs are set up, so it’s not like a lot of web users have never seen this arrangement.

So I’ll be re-optimizing this site with the nav bar over on the right side, and see if I can boost our search engine results.

Here’s the first step in creating and implementing an effective SEO strategy –  Do a preliminary keyword analysis to find the most potentially lucrative search terms.

A good search term is one that

1. gets some searches and
2. does not have a ton of competition.

Here are some tools you can use to find keywords like this:

1. Adword Analyzer
2. Google Trends
3. Google Adwords Keyword Analysis Tools
4. Microsoft Keyword Forcast Tool
5. Wordtracker

If you don’t want to do the analysis yourself, contact us for a <a href=”http://www.linknet-promotions.com/free-keyword-analysis.php” mce_href=”http://www.linknet-promotions.com/free-keyword-analysis.php”>Free Keyword Analysis</a> and we’ll suggest some keywords that are likely to work for you.

You don’t usually want to go after the most popular keywords because the competition will be fierce to get good Google ranking for these terms. Choose “long tail” terms – usually consisting of 3 or 4 words – that you have a chance of scoring well on and that will get you good ranking.

Remember, these are the kind of keywords you are looking for:

1. Keywords that get some searches and therefore can generate some traffic, and

2. Keywords that do not have a lot of competition – the fewer websites chasing ranking for them the better.

Once you find some good keywords, then you’re ready to go to town optimizing some webpages for them.

If you want a detailed introduction to SEO theory, SEO strategy, SEO techniques, and SEO best practices follow this link for more information about SEOBook.