optimize website for search engines

[Peter Prewett]

How do I ensure that the text I want the search engines find is displayed.

On my site it finds text part the way down the page, rather than the first line of text.

Peter

[gwpriester]

Keep your text as simple and directed as possible. Make sure your text ties into your website/page titles and page descriptions.

But do not repeat something too many times because you can sometimes be penalized for this.

Remember why people are visiting your site and make it as easy as possible for them to find the content they came to your site for.

IOW It's not magic. It's common sense.

[Peter Prewett]

Thanks.
Does it matter in what order the entries in the Page and Layer Gallery are?

If the search engines look at the HTML/text code and the order of text is different to the page layout, is this a problem?

As I see on my page the first text column on the page is below other text lines in the HTML/text code.

Peter

[Big Frank]

Search engines do not see what human visitors see. They see what you see when you do "View source". So, it does matter in what order you have your layers. Search engines will, in general, suppose that the most important text on a page is at the top*, so if you can ensure that the most important content comes before subsidiary content, you will be helping the search engines determine the importance of your different content.

* that's also one of the reasons why you should put huge blocks of javascript and/or css in external files, and which Xara does for you automatically

[Cloud]

Create your text for humans and have a splattering of keywords in there, make sure your keywords apply to one page only, don't try to use 4 or 5 different keywords on each page, best to have a specific keyword on a separate page. Most importantly make sure it is Original text, DO NOT copy and paste from other websites, you will be massively penalised.