4 questions about a paragraph of SEO friendly text in my e-com websites header.

[Jacobsheehan]

Hi guys,

I'm trying to understand the SEO behind our websites header.

www.mountainjade.co.nz

As you can see we have a paragraph of relevant introductory text that is also SEO friendly in our header. What I would like some help with is understanding how google views and assigns 'juice' to information like this in the header or footer of a website.

Usually certain pages have content specific to a given topic, and google ranks these pages accordingly. But with a websites header / footer its content appears on every page as the header is always at the top and footer at the bottom.

1. In what way does my website benefit from the paragraph of text in the header? e.g at the domain level? Just the home page? etc etc

2. How does google assign 'juice' to the paragraph of text? (similiar to Q1).

3. How would my website be effected if I moved the text to the footer? (Aesthetic change)

4. When I 'inspect element' on the paragraph, it is labelled 'div id=site description.' Can someone please explain the relevance of a sites description to SEO for me.

This paragraph of text was in the websites header before I came onboard, and I've been too concerned to change / move it as I don't know enough about it.

Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks team,

Jake

[Jacobsheehan]

Thanks Chris.

Everything you've said makes complete sense!

Best,

Jake

[aap82]

thanks for your answers, they really helped me

[BlueprintMarketing]

Good catch Chris

Jacob I agree with what Chris has to say completely.

_ By the way I see you are using WordPress if you do rebuild the site my personal opinion is use Genesis framework found here._

http://www.studiopress.com/features

_ And_

Woocommerce found here

http://www.woothemes.com/

_ if you want to simply use just woothemes there's no harm in that._

[Chris.Menke]

Jacob,

All this is is just a block of keywords someone stuck on hoping help rankings back when the was redesigned around October of 2012.  But since that paragraph is on every page, and because it's in the header, it's having little, if any impact on rankings. The value of headers and footers and blocks of text that repeat on all pages throughout the site are discounted in terms of the relevancy they provide to any one page.  "Juice" comes from off-page back links so that's not at issue here.

Don't bother moving it to the footer. It's probably worth revising and using only on the homepage but don't expect that to do amazing things for your rankings.

[BlueprintMarketing]

check out

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

http://illuminea.com/add-semantic-data-wordpress-site-20-minutes-less-my-talk-wordsesh-2013/

http://moz.com/blog/semantic-analytics

http://www.text-tools.net/tt-index.php#features

Tom

[BlueprintMarketing]

Hi Jake,

I'm going to do my best to answer this let me know if I am missing what you're saying.

1. In what way does my website benefit from the paragraph of text in the header? e.g at the domain level? Just the home page? etc etc

** It does not benefit from having a paragraph of text in the header unless that text is being used to describe the site to people looking at it in search engines.**

2. How does google assign 'juice' to the paragraph of text? (similiar to Q1).

Google does not assign juice the term "juice" is often used for links URLs link juice comes from a authoritative and relevant website linking to your website. It can also come from your own website linking to another relevant page internally.

3. How would my website be effected if I moved the text to the footer? (Aesthetic change)

If the text you're talking about is visible it would simply look like the current text in your footer. I would not recommend putting things in your footer unless you know what they are and why you are going to do it. Most information in the footer is not given as much authority as things found higher up in the page.

4. When I 'inspect element' on the paragraph, it is labelled 'div id=site description.' Can someone please explain the relevance of a sites description to SEO for me.

the code you gave me

'div id=site description.'

Is this CSS? not a meta description something that is important to the end-user so they can see what you're site is about when they're looking at it in Google's SERPs please see

http://moz.com/learn/seo/meta-description

For the code you gave it looks like the CSS code for a part of your website that is your paragraph description I'm assuming? see http://en.support.wordpress.com/custom-design/css-basics/

This paragraph of text was in the websites header before I came onboard, and I've been too concerned to change / move it as I don't know enough about it.

Welcome to Mountain Jade, New Zealand’s premium source of jade jewellery and greenstone jade art for sale. We work with leading New Zealand jade carvers to bring you traditional and contemporary Jade Jewellery art carved from New Zealand Pounamu and greenstone from around the world.

<a name="navmenu"></a>

move the text above anywhere you like. Remember if it is relevant and customers should be seeing it you will want to keep it visible therefore not in the footer.

My advice to you is add more text to your homepage it's very hard to understand what your company does as well as learn about it so one can purchase from it if you do that I believe it will help you quite a bit.

I hope I have not confused you as I want to be clear the welcome to the mountain text is on page or content text not the same thing as a meta-description however it is important to have text on your page without out it  it is like people and Google want to play Pac-Man without anything to eat a.k.a. the text it's very hard to do.

If you wish to make the site better you may want to use WordPress that is what I would do. You can also download some high-quality free code

https://html5boilerplate.com/

please check out

http://www.feedthebot.com/

&

http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

I hope this is helpful,

Thomas