Templates, Keywords and SEO

I am in the process of developing a site that (due to certain design considerations) places a fair amount of keywords in templates, rather than directly within the content area of the site’s pages. Although the keywords obviously appear in the rendered pages, is their SEO-effectiveness diminished because they do not actually reside directly within the content area of the site pages?

It depends on how you’re exposing these keywords. I believe that Google may even penalize pages for having too many "hidden" keywords, as that is a very common tactic of SEO spammers. If it’s not in your content, or somewhere visible on the page, why would a visitor want to go to your site if that’s what he’s looking for? The <title> tag as well as content headings are the best place to emphasize your page’s key words and phrases.

Thanks for the info.

Sunny

Do you mean meta-keywords in the HTML headers, or a bunch of keywords below the "Main Content" part of the site design?

If meta keywords, they’re all but pointless from an SEO perspective. If below the main content, they’ll be a bit diminished due to source ordered content, but still impact a page.

Google, as far as I know, parses the rendered page so if your keywords are in templates or content is irrelevant, it is whether they are visible on the rendered page.

As Susan says, title is the number one place for keywords but headings are important too. In my recent site my <h1> is the page title TV and it will get indexed (fingers crossed behind back)

Thanks all for your input. Yeah, I am not in any way trying to employ underhanded tactics for getting the site to rank higher, it is just that some of the site’s written content (by virtue of certain design constraints) ends up residing on the template for a page rather than within the content area of the page itself. From the perspective of the site viewer however, nothing is hidden and all of the content appears on the page.

Seems (based on what rthrash suggests) as though the effectiveness of these keywords might be slightly diminished, but I guess I will just have to live with that: definitely not going to restructure the site just to possibly boost the potency of a few keywords.

Ah, sorry! I have for so many years avoided any viewable content in the template that it never occurred to me that you have viewable material in the template. I presumed, which of course one should never do.

Quote from: sottwell at Apr 29, 2011, 12:29 AM

Ah, sorry! I have for so many years avoided any viewable content in the template that it never occurred to me that you have viewable material in the template. I presumed, which of course one should never do.

Could you expand on this please? Some viewable content is not designed to be editable by content editors, how should this be handled?

Do you mean it should be in chunks and then placed into the template?

I usually use TVs for this, and use MM or a resource group to hide the TV during editing as required. If the content is to be consistent across all resources, then the desired content is the default value of the TV.

Content in the template? I dont understand?
Why is there content on the page that users cannot see?
Have I missed the very obvious again?