I posted this earlier in a different forum (wrong one probably) and am reposting it here.

I have been working on the SEO from my site. I have utilized material from different sources including stopmper net.

During my research, I noticed that google picks up the first anchor tag for a link and used that anchor tag for all links that match on the page. If this is true, this means that the anchor tags being used by google are the ones in my nav pane on my site page, instead of the anchor tags for the categories in the body on that page.

Per my research, the easiest fix is (using css) move the code for the nav pane (left column) to after the body code instead of before it.

Now before you say it, I already know that I cannot tell the system how to arrange the code. That would be up to the programmers to do.

So my question is, for the stores that have their categories in the body of their home page with the preferred anchor tags, how do you handle this (or do you just not worry about it?)

And yes, I could change my category names except that I can't just rename them, I have to create, move and delete, then reset all the urls back to what they were before I did the change. I am leery of doing this with over 350 categories, that will take a lot of work and time.

I am open to suggestions as I need to get this piece straightened out for my SEO

Thanks

I don't think changing the name changes the url. If you change the name of the category, it shouldn't change the title or the URL. So technically you could just change the category names to get the desired anchor "text". Honestly though, this seems like more work than what it's worth. You're also talking about sacrificing general usability for what would appear to be very little SEO gain.

You could be working on it right now... but currently you have no left navigation. Once arriving at your site I find myself wondering where to click to get to what I want. After scrolling down you can notice the categories in the center column, however it's ideal to have some sort of visible navigation "above the fold". I don't know the exact statistics, but I would have to say the majority of online retailers use one of 3 navigation types. Either across the top, left, or right. Using right is very poor practice from a usability standpoint. Using the center as your navigation is probably not the ideal solution.