#1 - Prominence is a well discussed topic on Webmasterworld circa 2000 to 2005, in many threads. My question is about content prominence today, in 2009.

#2 - For anyone not sure what keyword prominence is Tedster explains it well here - [webmasterworld.com...]

#3 - This question is on Content Prominence and not Keyword Prominence.

My concern: I've built a site with a 3 column layout that follows the standard layout order(header/navbar/left column/center column/right column/footer). The site is wordpress driven but minimalistic in design with a high degree of effort placed on SEO. The average page, minus any text from content, is only 88 lines of code in length and most of the usual generic variables have been replaced. It would easily withstand Digg-like traffic.

The site uses only valid css for layout positioning but the content (center column), the meat of any page, shows up at the BOTTOM of the source code... after everything but the footer. It was easy to float the sidebars right and left to make everything cross-browser compatible, which meant adding the center column content last into the template.

Content prominence would be improved if the center column came before the left and right columns but this would require a lot of work on the template's css. Given that the content starts around line 50 in the code now and would move up to roughly line 31 if I move it ahead of the sidebars... should I make this change ?

The purpose of having content high on the page is to make it easy for search engines to find and the site already accomplishes that... in fact a regular page on the site has less code in total than most competitor sites do in the head section alone.

On the other hand the content comes at the end of the page, despite it being an extremely short page, which means if you look at the pure content prominence % it's not good.

The content is higher within the source than on most sites already, should I raise it higher just to achieve a good content prominence % ? What would you do?