Using CSS & JavaScript to move content & improve rankings

Although Google is very good at identifying sitewide navigational elements the algorithm still works on the basis that the content at the top of the page is the most important. If you consider a website with 3 blocks of text on a page the first one is usually the one that has the most influence on rankings.

If you look at the text only cache of a Blogstorm article in Google you can see that the source code starts with a few navigational links and the alt tag behind the logo before quickly moving to the article h1 tag, then the article content, the comments and finally the navigation links. Using this structure helps Google understand what the page is about and will improve your rankings.

Luckily most blogs use a CSS template similar to this (some don’t use the h1 tag on the post pages very well) so blogs don’t need too much SEO work. The hard part is creating the same effect on e-commerce sites or content sites.

Moving content

One of the best (on site) ways to rank highly for a popular keyword is to have a 500 word article about that keyword right at the top of your homepage. The problem is that this isn’t practical for any commercial site. The solution (other than using hidden text) is to add some content at the top of the page in the source code and use CSS or JavaScript to make it display lower down when a user views the page.

Moving content is against the spirit of the Google Guidelines so if you are using a lot of other aggressive techniques then it is wise to steer clear of the methods discussed below. However for large brands using mainly ethical SEO methods the chances of failing a hand edit are zero.

Simple CSS

Mobile network Three uses an interesting method, you can see their homepage contains a block of text at the bottom of the page starting with the words “Mobile Phones”. Looking at the source code reveals that this bit of code is actually the very first thing Google sees on the page. Three makes the technique nice and easy to spot by labeling the div as “_ctl0_divSEO”.

JavaScript & CSS

Moving content with JavaScript is demonstrated very well at Shawn Hogans blog, Shawn could just use CSS to achieve the same effect but the method is very useful in situations where CSS would fail.

Looking at the source code of Shawns blog you can see the code starts with an empty div:

At the bottom of the page the sidebar is generated but is hidden using the CSS display:none; property.

Some JavaScript then populates the empty sidebar div with the contents of the hidden div. The result - search engines see the content before the sidebar.

JavaScript & noscript

This is a very good way of displaying a lot of content in an unobtrusively small space at the top of your homepage. The idea is that you use a JavaScript news ticker or scroller at the very top of your page and then add noscript tags directly below it with the same content as the ticker.

In theory you can add anything to the noscript tags but if it is at all different to the actual content you risk failing a hand edit. Sometimes adding a lot of text in a noscript tag isn’t a good idea in which case you can use a CSS scroller to achieve much the same effect (getting a lot of text heavy content at the top of your page without pushing the commercial elements too far down).