Having Content be the First thing the bots see

[imageworks-261290]

If you have all of your homepage content in a tab set at the bottom of the page, but really would want that to be the first thing Google reads when it crawls your site, is there something you can implement where Google reads your content first before it reads the rest of your site? Does this cause any violations or are there any red flags that get raised from doing this? The goal here would just be to get Google to read the content first, not hide any content

[TheDude]

This can be done via CSS, but I'm not sure doing so has value any more.  It used to be a practice a couple of years back, but I don't think it is necessary anymore.

[imageworks-261290]

That's what I thought too....but I'm old school SEO and have no idea if this has changed! Thanks.

[Audiohype]

There's been a bit of dicussion about this before and I seem to remember that using CSS to push content up the page actually had a slightly beneficial effect on rankings.

It's mainly going to be an issue if your content is really low down on the page due to things like intrusive banner ads or lots of adverts.

[TheDude]

It is done using CSS, but it needs to be clarified if the content is down far due to other content on the page or if it is down low due to HTML tags (perhaps from a navigation).  The former might make a difference, but I think G can detect that trick anyway.  The latter is irrelevant in my opinion, as the tags will be discounted.

[imageworks-261290]

well....darn...its on the footer pretty much. Check out imageworksstudio.com

(about tab, lower left)

Thing is...you don't really want to spam up your site with content on a home page, as a branding firm we prefer short clear messaging that is focused on customer pain points, value props etc. Of course these are images and not really seo relevant anyways. Grrr - double edged sword.

Thanks again. I appreciate your comments.

[Audiohype]

Just checked how you have done it and I see what you mean - it's a bit tricky. One thing I noticed is that all that text is wrapped in a h1. I would take it out and put it in as standard content.

Also if you could take the text that is in your slideshow images and convert it to readable text that would provide you with a bit more relevant content on the site that may help.

Best of luck with it!

[imageworks-261290]

it should only be the first line as h1, not the content. We styled it all the same so it didn't look silly. WE did make local cities h2....not sure if that's good or bad...but it stinks to serve so many cities and only rank at your physical location. Especially when there are 20 cities with in 20 miles here in DC metro.

Not sure if local "city pages" will work or how that changes the landing page experience verse a very interactive home page...Google didn't think about all of that!