menu placement vs search engines

[wahmpee]

I am wondering about the menu placement on a webpage. Does this affect the search engines ability to read your site correctly?
Right now all my pages have the menu on the top left, it's the first thing inside the "body" tag.
Should it be placed somewhere else, so that the actual content of the page is closer to the first part of the body? Or does it matter?
This was my first ever website, with no experience, & it shows; inconsistent layouts, sloppy coding, excessive unneccesary stuff, etc...
My site has about 50 million other problems too, I know, but I decided to learn css, so I quit working on this site for the moment, & have a new improved condensed,css version in the works.
That's why I was wondering about menu placement for my new site, & would it be better to just make a menu using regular links?
(I won't have so many pages on my new site.)

[wahmpee]

maybe the post was too long?
My question:
does the menu placement on web pages affect the search engines ability to read or rank the site?

[Niko Holopainen]

I'm not one of the more experienced members here but according to what I've read here and elsewhere the menu placement matters due to pushing the content down for the spiders.

Currently on the page I'm working on, the emphasis is to have as few as possible navigational sections before the content.

With CSS or tables you can set your navigation after the main content, but with CSS I'd advice on testing it carefully since the layout easily breaks in some browsers if you use CSS to position the navigation that in the source code is after the content.

The manner in which I'm doing it (hopefully the right direction) is making small text/link top and left navigation with titles (and possible graphics through CSS on top), naming the navigational links through keywords (where possible) and pushing almost all of the page formatting into the css (thus making the content "closer" to the keywords and source page top).

Seems I wandered off... again. Anyways, maybe the more experienced people will comment on this?

[wahmpee]

that's what I wondered.
Right now my navigation code is huge, & it is the first thing inside the body tags.
I am currently trying to learn some basic css, & am creating a new site with it.
You also answered another question of mine, can the style sheet have the menu on it too, besides things like background, text color, etc...
that would be cool!

[joliettech]

A simple way to get your content before your navigation if you are using tables for layout is using a dummy cell.

A "dummy" cell is used before the body text instead of the list of links. The cell containing the main body text uses "ROWSPAN=2" so that it spans the tiny dummy cell and the cell containing the links. In this example, the cell containing the menu links now appears AFTER the main body content text.

<TABLE>
<TR>
<TD></TD>
<TD ROWSPAN=2 VALIGN=top>Welcome to the Web's blah blah blah blah... More body text goes here...</TD>
</TR>
<TR>
<TD>
Navigation Menu
</TD>
</TR>
</TABLE>

I hope this is helpful.

[flashedit]

Yes, the placement of your menu in front of your content will affect search engines. They can still read your code correctly, however it puts your important keywords further from the top decreasing your SEO.

CSS is a great way to take care of this problem. You can use it to place your menu code after your content in your html and have it display anywhere on your page. The only drawback is most older browsers do not display CSS correctly. However the more people that start using CSS the sooner people will upgrade their browsers.

Also with CSS you can make your "buttons" text links that are spiderable by using unordered lists. This can be great if you have keywords in your buttons.

Hope this helps, and good luck on learning CSS.