Web Page Layout
For the Search Engine Visitor - Part 3

This takes up time and it could mean a spider breaks off its attempt to catalogue your web pages if it takes too long to find what it wants.

Of course the spider will return later to complete the task, but that could take weeks. Meanwhile your web pages remain unlisted and unseen.

If you have a lot of java script code above the body content in your web page layout, you should consider moving it to a remote java script file.

This has the file extension .js and into which you place the java script code that currently exists in your web page.

The file is then called by the web page from the remote js file by inserting a call script in the head of your html page :

<script language=JavaScript src="myfilename.js "type="text/javascript"></script>

To get the body text right at the top of the web page layout, say typically between lines 5 to 20, two methods are frequently used.

One method involves the use of a layer into which the body text is inserted and the other more difficult involves changes to the main table layout of the page, assuming of course you're using tables.

Using a table layout is common, with the body text inserted within a cell or cells within the table. This can put the body text a long way down the code on the page.

The easiest to apply is the layer. An example code for which is:

<div class="bodytext" id="Layer1" style="position:absolute; left:50px; top:150px; width:500px; height:1200px; z-index:1">Your body text goes here</div>

The first part, the class="bodytext" is calling some code in a cascading style sheet.

The CSS controls how the text in the layer will appear to the human viewer.

The next part is the layer id, the name of the layer and the position absolute gives the exact coordinates on the screen at which this layer will appear. The units are in pixels or px.

The z index determines what level the layer is relative to other layers. To insert another layer under this one we could make this z=2.

All the body text then goes where shown and will appear to the viewer, in the web browser as normal.

In the coding of the web page layout this div layer can be placed right at the top of where the html code for the body begins and that's line 5 to 20 depending on your web page layout.

In a table layout with a navigation menu to the left the normal table html would place the body text below the code for the menu.

So what the 'spider' sees is all the html in the navigation menu before it gets to the body text.

The second technique that involves changes to the table layout does not work in all web pages. This is because it inserts a blank cell into the table on the second line.

If you've sliced images in the top of the page layout this can open up a small 1 pixel gap between the images which becomes noticeable.

If your web page layout is simpler the gap can be masked by changes to the background color making the gap invisible.

<table><tr>
<td> </td> <td rowspan="2">Your body text goes here</td>
</tr><tr> <td>Your navigation goes here</td></tr></table>

On the web page the navigation appears to the viewer on the left with the body text to the right as normal. But in the html for the layout, the body content comes first before the navigation menu code.

If you want to see what this looks like, just copy & paste the above code into a web page layout and view it in a browser.

Another problem search engine spiders have difficulty with are web pages called by cgi scripts.

A cgi script is a small program that exists on the web server to be used on some web sites to call web pages. A link to a web page using a cgi script or other similar form of script can't be followed by a spider so the page will not get indexed.

This can be of positive benefit when you don't want a page indexed especially for things like forms and thank you pages.

Script generated links with long strings of numbers in the URL link will also be difficult, if not impossible, for 'spiders' to follow, as will links with dynamic unique session ID's.

Links containing a ? can also cause problems for some spiders, but it would seem Google is now able to follow these types of links.

This can be a real problem for e-commerce catalog web sites that call pages from scripts.

The site will just never get indexed by a search engine without modification to the web page layout.