A website’s design has always been important, not only in terms of user friendliness and aesthetics, but also to encourage discovery of a page’s content by search engine robots. As any web designer should know – poorly coded web pages can cause issues with the overall search engine friendliness of a website. Actually, the age-old adage “it’s what’s inside that counts” couldn’t ring more true today. It’s the “what’s inside” that is the focal point of what we’re talking about.

Page Layout and Structuring

In a patent application published last month, it seems that Yahoo is moving towards the notion of systematically identifying the “meat” of a web-page, whereby helping their search engine to determine the parts of a page that contain the most important content. This patent will hopefully translate into a shift in how search engines rank pages – namely, the actual content of a page receives more weight than the repetitious properties such as sidebars, page headers and footers.

Now, unless you’re fluent in legal and technical jibber-jabber, the patent filing: Techniques for approximating the visual layout of a web page and determining the portion of the page containing the significant content may be a bit much for you. Suffice it to say, it’s not something that most people would consider a relaxing read.

However, Bill Slawski of SeobytheSea.com sums up an appropriate hope in this post (http://www.seobythesea.com/?p=1009):

“If a search engine could understand the layout of a web page and identify the most important part of a web page, it could pay more attention to that section of the page when indexing content from the page.

It could give links found within that section of the page more weight than links found in other sections of the page, and it could consider information within that area more weight when determining what the page is about.”

Now, Google and MSN already have methods in place where they attempt to compartmentalize web pages and hone-in on a sectional level to help determine what part of a web page is more important than the others. These patents and methods have been around for a couple of years, so that, in itself isn’t “breaking news”.

However – with Yahoo’s patent, this puts a new twist on the importance of a website’s content and layout. If search engines can somehow identify the most important part of a web page in their ranking algorithms, this presumably will help with identifying keyword relevance for that page, amongst adding to the weight of the “link juice” being passed through links from within the page’s content.

It’s obviously too soon to tell whether this patent will create a major shift in how search engines view and rank web pages, but it’s something that you should definitely be paying attention to. And, in case you missed it – the best way to prepare your website for any changes that may occur is to maintain a consistent and predictable page layout. While this has always been the recommended rule-of-thumb for a user-friendly website design, it’s looking like it might just be an important aspect of your website’s search engine optimization strategy as well.