I like your new skin. I was looking at the fact that even though the logo, login, search and menu appear above the content that the content is almost the first item in the HTML file.

I thought that doing this to my skin might be easy. It is not near as easy as I had hoped.

I have two questions: 
   1. Does this really make a difference in Search Engine Optimization?
   2. What is the CSS strategy to do this in the aspx and css files? 

I looked at your CSS and you have some Absolute Position statements, but these still place the element inside of the element that it is inside. How do you move the menu down?

On a similar subject, Keywords - How do search engines look at them?
A list of important words that MUST be in the page text, or a list of words that might not be in the text but users might use when reasonably searching for this site?

Got any idea on what limits Google and friends place on the size of the common meta-tags other than truncating the title and description?

Also Google is insistent on using the Description from DMOZ rather than the one from DNN, which I keep short. Any idea on how to get them to take mine? I have tried twice to get DMOZ to update their copy with no luck.  I hope the try this week is the charm.

Again You have done a great job with your new skin,
/DaveS

Hello,

thanks, 1) before I switched over to the pure CSS skin  the search engines still managed to index the pages. - but, if you can make their life easier every little helps for a competitive keyword.

2. It is a combination of floats and absolute positioning

Absolute positioning does remove the elements out of the flow of the page which is how I have placed elements at the end of the source code but they appear at the top of the page in the skin.

As it happens I am currently creating videos on CSS SEO layouts based on a stripped down version of the DNN creative skin and I will be releasing these in the next issue.

Keywords - it all depends on a combination of the links that are coming into the pages and keywords that are in the links, any keywords in your domain name, the keywords on the page, and the keywords in the page title and description

I don't have any problems with Google reading my DotNetNuke page titles and descriptions. Do you specify a different title, description and keywords for every page?

A lot of information is contained in these tutorials:

Keywords Research Free Guide - pdf

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Made Easy Free Guide - pdf

I look forward to your next video with great interest, as usual.

I'll read you two pdfs as well.

My Description problem is that Google takes a very stale description from DMOZ for my home page rather than the one that is on the page.  I have updated the DMOZ one but thier reviewers don't ever seem to apply the update.

After I made my post last night I search Google's videos for the SEO ones by Matt Cutts and found one that talked about this subject. Google has a meta-tag that tells Google not to use the Open Directory description.  I stuffed it in the Home Pages header and we'll see what effect it has after the next index.

While searching I found a page that I stupidly didn't bookmark, where several SEO guru's were grading (voting 1-5) on the importance of a long list of SEO issues.  They all thought that the content of the keywords and description meta-tag didn't mean much today.  Links are where it's at! 

Looking at the links that Google recognizes to my home page link:www.AgingSafely.com you only see two, even though there are  that many from just DNN Creative's site. Yahoo lists many more links:www.AgingSafely.com about 40.  I can see that Google might be smart not to take them from Forums, but they also are missing some very valid ones as well.  Any ideas on why Google doesn't notice some of these links?  Also any easy successful strategies to add ligitimate links. 

content is where it is at. - the more useful content that you have on your site, the more the search engines will index and the more likely you are to receive genuine incoming links from previous visitors. - if you follow that method your site will naturally grow and have strong foundations.

RSS feeds are good for getting incoming links, you can publish your RSS feed in directories and users can publish your content on their website.

Also publishing articles in directories and other sites related to yours can also be a good way of getting incoming links.

The search engines always vary from month to month the number of links, pages etc. that they index / report on as indexed.

This is a useful site for checking on your SE stats: http://www.selfseo.com

Thanks,