Reducing the site's header to get more content Above the Fold
-
The user bizzer posted the following question on the post (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/guide-to-ads
"I've got my above the fold area very light on advertising since Panda. But reading #4 about the "template" makes me wonder if I should go further and reduce the height of my header area and maybe even remove one of my two sidebars, so as to increase the content-to-template ratio above the fold. Make sense?"
What do you think?
-
I used to have a site with a huge beautiful image in the banner. It looked great. But it dominated the above-the-fold real estate. My content was pushed way down, so were the ads that bring revenue.
So, I made a small, sleek banner that is simply the domain name, search box and social share buttons.
After that was remove my pages had a big article title shouting at the top of the browser window and a beautiful relevant image at the top of the article.
Instantly.....
-
people were staying longer on the site
-
average pageviews per visitor went up
-
my bandwidth was cut by gigabytes per day
-
revenue went up
Should you do this? I would make a quick test that does not require a lot of work, toss it up for a couple of days and let your analytics tell you if it is a good thing.
You can get a quick answer with two hours of work and two days of statistics.
Try it. Then use data to make your decision. The actions of your visits will instruct you.
Also consider this.... After you remove the banner will you have anything that is beautiful above the fold? Almost every page of my site has a big juicy colorful image at the top of the article. This eye candy pulls people in. I don't think that my results would be the same if I had a big page of boring text and no images.
-
-
You can have a page 1 position 1 site but if it doesn't provide what the user wants visually then your conversions from visitor to buyer will suffer. Basic seo still works but google wants quality sites that are popular. It's best to create a site that is easy for search engines to crawl, visually appealing, easy for a user to navigate and provides all the information a user would need. Also make sure to market your site on all social media.
-
Just always ask yourself this question "Is it good for your users or is it going to benefit them." Trust me like many of us SEO we get caught up in the mindset of "old"SEO practices were we want to optimize for ranking. Google does not want us to write content for search engines, write content for the user. So if it's a good decision that will benefit the users then do it.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Duplicate Content
Hi I am new to SEO and at the moment looking at warnings from the crawl diagnostics report. When I have looked at the content from the urls given I cant see anything obvious that relates to duplicate content. Whats the best way to find out the problem please?
On-Page Optimization | | Pauline080 -
Will canonical tag on non-copy content harm my site?
Days ago I added rel=canonical tags on my site. For the post pages, I add canonical tag on both post page (www.exmample.com/post.html) and comment page (www.exmample.com/post-sms.html), all the canonical tags are pointing to post page, but in fact there are only comments on the comment page. For product pages, I add the canonical tags on both product info page, download page, and order page, all of them are pointing to the info page, while in fact they are displaying different content. I no-indexed the comment page, download page, and order page for a long time. After I added the canonical tags, the traffics dropped (not hugely but slowly and steadily). Are my actions harming my site? Is this a normal flux after adding codes to the entire site, or it's the bad outcome for wrong SEO actions? PS: I can't change the site structure, so it's not possible to combine post and comment pages into one, so do the product pages. Thank you guys
On-Page Optimization | | JonnyGreenwood0 -
Abvoe the Fold
Quality above the fold is often mentioned for SEO. Is there a good definition of what is above the fold?
On-Page Optimization | | casper4340 -
On-Page SEO Priorities: Title's, Anchor Text or Meta data?
**Any suggestions for prioritized on-page SEO work? Relative weights of importance? ** **What is most important from highest to lowest? ** MetaTag Descriptions? Titles? Anchor Text? Alt Text - for images? Anything else? We might not be able to do everything at once like I desire ......but I do feel we should at least get the ball moving in the right direction. I am looking for ideas or suggestions on what to prioritize for a little bit of on-page SEO work on our website. I personally feel that SEO is pretty important but I am a novice. I have been reading this site the past week and want to convince my webpage guy that on-page SEO is important and that we should at least do a few things and gradually get the work done. Rightfully so our #1 priority is to redesign our landing pages (they are bad) . I also think we should do a little On-Page work concurently. (Lack of on-page SEO is also preventiing me from successfully submitting and being accepted by Dmoz, Yahoo, BOW etc) He is mainly a back engine guy and does a very good job with that. If I were to TELL him to do a few prioritized on-page SEO things what would you suggest? He did do something on the home page at my suggestion but that is all to this point. We have over 400 pages indexed with very little on-page SEO on them. Thank you, UtahTiger
On-Page Optimization | | Boodreaux0 -
Duplicate Content
Hi I have Duplicate content that i do sent understand 1 - www.example.dk 2- www.example.dk/ I thought i was the same page, whit and without the / Hope someone can help 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | seopeter290 -
How to avoid product's lists from making your site's content duplicated?
Hi there! We at Outitude, recently launched an outdoor activities marketplace and to make it easy for users to compare activities we show a list of available activities in each activity view. The problem is that though the content is different, the first half is practically identical. Example:
On-Page Optimization | | alexmc
Sailing for a full day: http://outitude.com/en/sailing/world/sailing-full-day and sailing for half a day: http://outitude.com/en/sailing/world/sailing-half-day both URL's are different, their content is different but most of it is not (first half of the page), so that the user can compare the activity it is currently seing with others. Questions: How can we show the activities list without it ruining the page rank? Do you advise the use of "", "" surrounding the duplicated content aka activities lists? Thanks in advance.0 -
Duplicate content? Not sure.
Good news! I have my first real SEO gig and now I have to be able to actually deliver. I'm up for it but I want to be sure I'm seeing what I think I am before suggesting any changes. I'm working my way throught Danny Dover's excellent book SEO Secrets and learning tons! To see if there is duplicate content on the site, I've taken a sentence from one of the pages on the site and searched for it: i.e., site:storybooksforhealing.com "Some of the most quiet moments are often the most difficult after a loss. Mornings, late nights, time alone." The SERPs show 7 pages that have this text on it. It seems like this is duplicate content, right? This is a Wordpress website so what's happening is the actual page is here: www.storybooksforhealing.com/publish-cup-of-joy/ but there are several archive pages that show excerpts of this text, too. If this is duplicate content (first question) then how would I go about remedying it? Should I set the canonical reference to /publish-cup-of-joy page? Thank you for being patient with my NOOB questions.
On-Page Optimization | | ChristiMc0 -
I changed my site from HTML to PHP and I need to get some help.
Ok...so the other day I went from HTML to PHP in every part of my website. I want to know the best option for me for redirecting my pages from HTML to php. I had my site scanned with SEOMoz and I was given many 404 errors which is not at all good. I do not have any pages of my site linking to any of these html pages. All of the site links have been updated. I have checked 3 times. I have never created a robots.txt file so I would love to get a little help with this part. I was thinking it would be best to tell Google not to worry about these pages in the file. I kept the pages up and I plan to remove all code with them so that no content shows up if someone visits but the issue with that is my site is already indexed as HTML. I want to have the HTML pages redirect to the PHP without worrying that my visitors will land on my site via Google onto an HTML page. I hope I am making sense. What is the best advice you can give me. I need all pages to redirect to PHP. I used an htaccess redirect from all HTML to PHP but when I get so many of them added I get an error on my site saying too many redirects. Seriously need help.
On-Page Optimization | | TrendyHost0