You can used positioned child elements to organize the page code, and
this can be a very effective tool to achieve your goals. But this will
only help if your layout will not suffer when font sizes are changed
in the browser. If your home page layout is mostly graphics, then that
approach will work fine as far as the layout goes, but you need to
solve some more fundamental problems with regard to SEO if you leave
things at that.
To re-parent elements, and organize them into a hierarchical layout,
you simply click on the Site header at the top of the site panel in
Freeway, and toggle it over to Page view. Then you will see a list of
all the elements on the current page. You can click and drag on their
names to move them around in the hierarchy, and drag an element to the
right underneath another to make that other element the parent of your
dragged element. Usually, making these moves does not affect the
position of the element on page, only the hierarchy of the code.
When looking at this list, there are two things to consider: elements
near the top of the list are layered to the back, and elements at
the bottom of the list are layered to the top. However, when it
comes to the source code – i.e. the only thing Google cares about –
the inverse is true. The outline of elements is pretty much exactly
the order that the HTML will be written. You can use this disconnect
to your advantage, by putting the HTML for the H1 headline and summary
paragraph at the very top of the list, and lower-priority options like
your global navigation at the bottom of the list. It doesn’t matter at
all whether these elements are next to one another in the visible page
or not, or which one comes first or last. The only thing that Google
cares about is the order of elements in source, and how they are
organized semantically.
Getting back to what I was saying about the SEO drawbacks of using
images instead of HTML text – if you organize your layout using
positioned children, you will guarantee that when someone enlarges the
text in their browser, they will see elements crashing over the top of
one another, text overlapping text, etc. Unreadable.
But if you have used images for text, while you won’t see this
problem, you will also fail dramatically to have any SEO juice at all,
because the Alt text of an image doesn’t “rate” the same way that
actual text in a paragraph or a header tag would.
Think about ways to include your images (background images
particularly) behind your HTML text. Strip all or most of the text
from your images, and make them do what they’re good for – setting a
mood and enhancing the visual organization of the page – while not
trying to depend on them for semantic meaning.
Walter
On May 22, 2011, at 6:34 AM, Mark wrote:
Walter
Sorry me again.
You suggest using ‘inflow’ items to minimise the amount of code and
make it make more sense to search engines.
Can I use ‘independent’ items positioned relative to a parent item,
to achieve the same results? Or is this not considered the ‘box
model’ approach?
i.e. I draw a big HTML box and then create child items within the
parent item. The child items will contain my image tiles and text.
And I don’t have to worry about ‘float’ and ‘clear’ and ‘padding’
and ‘margins’ because the child items have absolute positions
relative to the parent item.
Thank you once again
Mark
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