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If you think about the theory of electricity and consider how electricity will take the path of least resistance, you can use that as a visual example of how Googlebot as well as most web crawlers will crawl your pages, especially your home page.
The above are screen shots of three random blogs of mine that I pulled from thought. The Airplane Blog, How Do I Make Money Online and Best Deals Online. [click the images to view sites]
These three blogs are total examples of how I have placed huge design efforts towards building a really quick path to GROUND ZERO for web crawlers.
Many website designs look pretty and fancy, and I’ll be the first to admit that my own custom web designs might not win any beauty contests, but I assure you there is a damn good reason why my websites look and are CODED they way they are.
I focus on getting my content indexed, and indexed quickly… not only that, but I focus on getting my content ranked and seen in the search engines.
Web crawlers take the path of least resistance. Meaning, they are going to crawl the links found on a page in the order in which they receive them.
When I view the source code on a lot of blogs, the links to the most recent posts are found on the mid page or very near the bottom of the page. The result is not good for SEO. What commonly happens with sites that carry this type of design is that it takes multiple web crawler visits to get to the most recent content and links.
The problem with blog templates and WordPress themes, is the fact that CSS blinds and tricks the author into thinking that his most recent content gets seen quickly where in reality it doesn’t.
CSS is a way to style HTML. It is used to make web pages look pretty. CSS manipulates the front end presentation of web pages so that the web pages doesn’t appear in an un styled form.
Now, I am not going to go into a huge amount of detail in regards to how to make WordPress themes or assure that your current WordPress theme is search engine friendly. Instead, I really want to just bring out more awareness and give you a little overview. Also, there are tons of books available…. Buy books!!! I can’t stress this enough. Reading books on CSS, HTML, PHP and SEO will help a lot.
When a web crawler visits my site it will see my most recent content listed first and the titles will be wrapped in <h2> tags.
From there, it will then view my tags directly at the end of each post, these also have <h2> tags.
Going further down the site, the web crawler will start to make its way into my sidebar… from there, depending on a few tweaks, I usually wrap my links in <h3> tags. Going further down the sidebar, the web crawler will then start to crawl my <h4>’s and or <strong> tagged links. The order of importance always remains the same:
Home Page Link
Recent Post Links
Category and or Tag Links
Sidebar Content Links
Footer Links
<h1> Tag is the ultimate most important ranking tag
<h2> Is second most ranking (or least path of resistance)
*again assuming you have things ordered correctly on your code
<h3> Third ranking priory
<h4>, <strong> and <b> tags are about the same in value.
Another way to look at this is chess:
King = H1
Queen = H2
Rook = H3
Bishup/Kinght = H4, STRONG, BOLD
Pawns = standard links with no font weight or heading tags
SEO isn’t rocket science… its just the practice of building pages that are friendly for users as well as search engines.
If you want to see how web crawlers see your pages, you can download a text only web browser such as lynx.
Or you can temporarily remove this line of code from your header.php file (wordpress users)
* Make back up first…
<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”<?php bloginfo(’stylesheet_url’); ?>” type=”text/css” media=”screen” />
Doing this will remove the call for your style sheet and make your blog look basic black text on white background with zero styling… it will also show you the order in your links.
I hope all this makes sense to you guys, I didn’t mean to blast out so much info… drop me a comment if you have any questions! Remember, web crawlers will crawl links with the least resistance. 
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Date/Time: 1-29-2008 00:32:39 Comment #9889
Ahem,…nice pink blog you have there, buddy.
Date/Time: 1-29-2008 00:51:33 Comment #9891
Ok, all kidding aside:
and that is the problem. CSS can’t change the order in which web crawlers view the links. CSS can change how things look on the front end, but the back end remains the same.
Another way of looking at this is this:
My footer… it appears on the bottom of the page. My CSS controls that… I can easily place the HTML code of my footer on the top of my page but assign it DIV tags to make it appear on the bottom. The result would be that web crawlers would see my footer first before anything else, but front end readers would know no difference.
The same goes with the header. I could put my header HTML code at the very bottom of the page, but wrap it in div tags and assign style values to them to make the header appear on the front end to be on the top.
If you want to see what you blog really looks like naked with no clothes on, remove this line from your header.php file
<link rel=â€stylesheet†href=â€<?php bloginfo(’stylesheet_url’); ?>†type=â€text/css†media=â€screen†/>
refresh your page and observe… and then put that line of code back.
Date/Time: 1-29-2008 01:07:11 Comment #9892
Did you used to work for the Department of Redundancy Department? LOL
I think I explained what I saw incorrectly. I’ve been meaning to find the template that demonstrates this, but if I recall correctly I believe the content was up high in the code, but placed via CSS on the sidebars and footers as appropriate. That would work, right?
Date/Time: 1-29-2008 01:55:15 Comment #9894
What….
base first on who’s and rephrase the question, please.
Date/Time: 1-29-2008 06:43:58 Comment #9898
I would highly recommend using Lynx Text Browser. I wrote about it last year and it is by far the biggest help in understanding what a crawler will see. One extra cool thing about Lynx, you can print the results to a text file for reviewing.
View from a search spider
Date/Time: 1-29-2008 07:50:33 Comment #9900
I’ve been comparing your new Digs’Em theme to my current theme on Zath Games Tech and can see quite a few ways that it could be improved just from what you’ve talked about here. However, rather than struggle with that theme, I may utilise your good practice in your theme and either create my own or use Digs’Em until I’ve been able to teach myself more about CSS to create my own.
I really like this subject, more tips on creating themes would be very much appreciated!
Date/Time: 1-29-2008 09:08:08 Comment #9903
Great point about the Recent Posts being to low. I usually don’t display recent posts on my blogs because a properly done sitemap should take care of that problem, but if you don’t use a sitemap, having Recent Posts up top could make quite the difference.
I also like how you have the advertisements displayed in those screenshots. I don’t think I noticed them before because my NoScript blocks Google AdSense.
Date/Time: 1-29-2008 15:16:04 Comment #9926
due lack of time in this period I’m not concentrating on the themes now, but I’ll hope to be able to do it in a near future.
This are all great information that i set apart for my next restyle.
ciao
alex
Date/Time: 6-26-2008 04:38:46 Comment #16170