I've been reading several SEO books in preparation for a full site re-write. One of the suggestions that I've seen several times is that content should come before navigation in the site's markup.
Question: If a site is using top-level navigation, how can content come before navigation (in the markup, not the presentation), and is this really necessary?
Content before navigation (in the HTML, not necessarily in terms of the layout on the page) is more useful for accessibility than SEO. I would do it for those reasons.
Those using screen readers will get the content quicker than if they have to hear every item in every drop down menu on your navigation.
That doesn't sound right, placing content above the navigation bar. Is that what these books are suggesting? The majority of websites have navigation either horizontal across the top such as Zappos and Amazon or vertically on one side or the other like ebay.
Using text when possible above your navigation is ok if it's done cleanly and for your visitors not search engines.
You can suggest for your site review to switch from images to text links in the navigation, use CSS to give them style. Add alt text to images. There's so much that's involved in on-site optimization that content above or below the navigation is a small part.
Years ago people would set their z-index of div tags to place certain content above other content in hopes search engines would read it in z-index order. If there's any truth to that you can set a lower z-index on your navigation wrapper.
Question: If a site is using top-level navigation, how can content come before navigation (in the markup, not the presentation), and is this really necessary?
I couldn't disagree with this more. IMO, your site navigation should come ahead of SEO (may be not a popular opinion). This allows pages to have the general navigation displayed in Google: EG amazon https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=amazon&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
And since your site navigation is typically quite a small list (you get more navigation options from clicking these 'general route level menu links' which allow you to drill deeper) I don't think there is any penalization at all - to swap the whole page around could make maintenance more difficult, but will certainly not read well to Google IMO.
However, ensuring that the page content is pretty much the next thing that is read by Google is important. Use a lynx viewer or similar - again, my opinion but after the menu, there should be a heading tag and content / about the page (even before products - from as little as a paragraph).
It would technically be possible, I think, if you applied:
position:relative
To the page's container class and:
position:absolute
To the nav element.
Visually it would look like the standard nav-above-content layout, but from a coding standpoint it would be the opposite.
Like this example: http://jsfiddle.net/AFK9j/
