It’s that time again for another quick SEO tip and today’s subject is techniques for displaying content.
We all know that SEO content is a key ingredient in order for a page to rank and this content usually contains keywords targeted towards the current page and homepage, this content creation is very important and you may find it more often than not clients don’t want it ‘above the fold’ or close to the top of the page. So what can you do? If only there was a way to display this content so that it was discreet but also not cheating Google, well there is and there are a couple of ways of doing it. Some of the ways are:-
Accordion
Thanks to the developers over at jQuery they released a UI which generates accordions and lets you style them without having to touch a piece of code, very handy! Accordions fit nicely into most designs and come with several options for customization, what I personally like about accordions is they involve user interaction and display perfectly if Javascript is disabled.
Tabs
Tabs are similar to accordions but display horizontally instead of vertically, they are actually created by the same jQuery UI so are also very simple to create. Tabs take up less space on the page and are self-explanatory to use so a very good option to go with. What is also a bonus with both tabs and accordions is the content gets split up into sections, large chunks can look intimidating or overwhelming to a user and they would simply ignore it which Google wouldn’t like either.
Custom
If you’ve been doing SEO for a while or you simply don’t like the look of tabs/accordions you can opt to use custom techniques, there are hundreds out there and some of them are brilliant and creative in their design. One in particular that I like was created by jQuery for designers called the ‘coda slider effect’, it is a take on the tab system but is more visual.
Plain
Depending on how much content is needed to be displayed you could simply try plain text, if you can get the correct layout, maybe three columns of small chunks it can fit nicely within the site. There are many sites out there that do this on their homepage and it looks inviting when combined with an icon and title.
It is common sense to think that content further up the page is most important and this is what you need to understand, Google also thinks this way when crawling pages so try and get your great keyword-rich content ‘above the fold’. Also, don’t look at simply creating content for normal pages, consider looking at other media such as powerpoints or PDF’s, it could be more engaging for a reader.