Left side navigation, need extra row above that?

[sitepointRefugee]

I plan to add the left side navigation in some of pages in my site for 3 reasons: Accessibility, usability and SEO. Now I read somewhere that there should be an extra row right above the left side navigation so that the main content gets read by search engines and then links in the left side navigation get read. Is this the design I should follow or it doesn't really matter today?

[Chris]

It doesn't really matter.

Considering how important links are to your ranking and the crawling of your site I'd even say your menu should be on top. Otherwise, if you have alot of content, the SEs might not even see it.

[sitepointRefugee]

Considering how important links are to your ranking and the crawling of your site I'd even say your menu should be on top.
A question kind of related to that. Let's just say that both top and left have a bunch of links for SEO. Also let's assume that the site is also running ads, banner, contextual, whatever. Now it appears that placing ads in the left side can produce much higher CTR as opposed to right side, but from SEO perspective, you just need to place ads in the right side. So there is some conflict here if you are running ads in your site.

SEO vs CTR, which one should you prioritize? Should you prioritize SEO to increase the number of clicks or you should prioritize CTR and design your site that way?

I might be simplifying the scenario, but I'd like to know what you think.

[chromate]

I would say SEO first, CTR second. Without the traffic in the first place, there wont be the users to click the links.

Unless you have very long pages of content, I really doubt it matters too much where you place your links. This is especially true if you have a good sitemap in place. Left or top is preferable of course, but it's not a big deal.