Content Best Practices

Hey all,

Feel free to chime in. I am building a site for a client who wants the look and feel to be as clean as possible, but also wants content for seo purposes. It is a photographer portfolio site. They are requesting that the copy be far below the fold so that the user would have to scroll to find it. My initial reaction was that this was not very user focused. All the seo stuff I’ve read talks about the necessity for having text based content that is as readable and compelling as possible.

Do you have any feelings about the content below the fold technique? Any downside? Any examples of this technique that come to mind?

-Noah

The SEO efforts probably won’t amount to much more than a lot of hits with a high bounce rate because fewer people will stick around if the site is not well laid-out.

You could accomplish both, however: you could put the content up high in the html and use CSS to position the the image(s) to appear first in the display. I’ve used this technique before to place ads -- even the leaderboard was at the bottom of the html, but appeared at the top of the page.

made a site for a photographer as well. no content besides galleries ... and i see google responding to tagging your ressources (galleries)

this is the first time I’ve heard of the position of keywords matter in terms of SEO.
I think that the first 100 or so words have a higher importance, but don’t think that the actual placement matters.

SEO optimization for a photographer I would say requires a lot of off-site optimization. I mean, how many Photographer and given City are there already? So optimize the page title, keywords and description metas, and use a good descriptive alt tags for the images. I also like to suggest a blog that links to the portfolio. Blogs are like Google keyword fodder now-day.
Additionally, my little trick for image galleries is to host images with flickr. That way you already have strong tagged links pointing to your site. Though I must admin, I can’t substantiate this with any hard data, but it seems reasonable to me .

I don’t think the SEO issues are that serious (especially using Everett’s method), but it just seems wrong to put text where many users will never see it unless the text is completely unimportant. It’s also hard to know exactly where "below the fold" would be when some visitors will be using high-res monitors and others might be viewing the page on a 10" netBook.