Dangerous Thinking

We find it’s always desirable to place optimized content as high up in the site plan as we can – ie as few clicks away from the Home page as possible. While the search engine spiders will find the content if the site is set up correctly, the indexer may decide that the content isn’t very important because you’ve placed in a hard-to-get-at location. The result is that the page ranks more poorly than expected.

So, in such a situation, hard work spent optimizing may well not bring the returns you’re looking for.

Recently, we’ve found another wrinkle. If the pages between the Home page and the page(s) with the optimized content do not contain a reasonable amount of spiderable content (eg they contain graphics or Flash and/or little HTML-based copy), the search engines seem even more likely to ignore the optimized content located further in the site.

All this is yet another argument for planning sites with the SEO in mind. You really need to make sure all your important copy is presented in the right way to the search engines.