What is SEO?

SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, is the term used for improving your site in relation to your search engine ranking. Your placement in the search engine index is essential to your flow of traffic. The vast majority of mainstream sites will receive traffic directly from search engines such as Google. The higher your ranking / placement in these indexes, the greater the flow of traffic.

For example, if you are an Electrician in Miami, Florida, and someone googled electrician miami and you hold the #1 spot in Google, it is most likely that person will visit your site. Most searchers are going to browse the first few sites in Google and not others. Therefore, you want to be placed in this bracket.

How is Nexus Optimised?

Although most of your optimisation will be with your keywords and content, the template itself can play a role in making your site more search engine friendly. The structure of the template, as with all our themes from April 2009 onwards, are constructed in an atypical fashion which places the main column before the left and right column. Therefore, as the main column loads the vast majority of your content and component, it is logical to assume that this is where your most important data is collated. Subsequently, you will want Google to crawl that first before moving on to the other elements.

This is best illustrated with an example:-

<!--Begin Main Column (col1wrap)-->   
<div id="maincol">...</div>
<!--End Main Column (col1wrap)-->

<!--Begin Left Column (col2)-->
<div id="leftcol">...</div>
<!--End Left Column (col2)-->

<!--Begin Right Column (col3)-->
<div id="rightcol">...</div>
<!--End Right Column (col3)-->

With the diagram above, you can see that even though you visually see the left column on the left, the main column in the middle and the right column on the right, the code construction places the main column first, then the left and finally the right.

Configuration

To configure the widths of the left, right and inset columns, go to Extensions → Template Manager → rt_nexus_j15 and edit the parameters there as shown below:-