Hotspot area for SEO

[Essentia]

Hi, we have an online store: http://www.redwrappings.com.au/

There's been a debate regarding which area is recognised to be the most important place/hotspot for SEO:

1. Free delivery van area (top left panel) OR
2. Top menu navigation

Given that if you look at the page html source code, the top navigation loads last and the free delivery fan area is the first one to be read in the html source code.

We did this because we want the body page content (h1 & text content) to be read first by search engine robot & also the body can load faster for the user.

Is this the right thing to do or we better off load the top navigation first?

Thanks

[de4e]

Just today have read good related article http://www.seobythesea.com/2012/01/sets-semantic-closeness-segmentation-and-webtables/ .

Personally i recommend start using HTML 5 semantic tags to help Google better understand structure of you content. Even if there are not ranking factors at this time, once HTML5 became a standard it will.

Also agree with Egol - stuff at the top of the page (in html code) a lot more important know.

[wojkwasi]

If you're taking that approach, I'd make the h1 and opening paragraph as close to the opening body tag as possible (even move the free delivery van near the nav & position everything absolutely via the CSS), reduce the amount of javascript calls, use div tags instead of tables... I've built sites this way and have noticed some improvements. The main thing is to clean up the code as much as possible by removing inline CSS calls, comments, externalising all javascript etc to make the site load faster.

Some other things to consider:

• site has 229 links on the home page - consider reducing to under 100 (the footer contains excessive links)
• center the design.. looks strange on a big monitor

[EGOL]

I don't get it?

I think that google is smart enough to know what part of the page is the content and what part of the page is the wrapper.  So, I spend zero time on tactical coding.

I think that the stuff that you show the visitor at the top of the page is a lot more important that what is at the bottom.  Otherwise it would not be at the top of the page. 

So, I am going to put the items of jugular importance there and load that part of the code first... actually I am going to simply do top-down, left-right coding so my code has the same structure as 99% of the sites on the web.

I think that when you try to do cool wizard stuff that you actually paint a target on your butt that says.. "I am an odd duck".