Is there a way to adequately accomplish this? This is from an SEO site, but I've heard it for years and would like to implement it, if it can be achieved on this cart system.

Well all know how important keyword position is. The closer your keywords are to the top of the page the better, especially if you can get them into the first full sentence. This might seem to pose a problem for sites with a long left-hand sidebar, since all that content comes first in the HTML, which is how the spider views the page. An easy solution is to make the first cell in the left-hand column blank and put the sidebar in the second cell. Here's how that would work for two- or three-column layouts.

If anyone knows how or if this can be done, please let me know. I've tried a couple of things, but when I run the simulator, I don't see the change, it's still reading the left hand links first.

Thanks,
Heartland

Keyword position isn't so much a matter of where it is, but in what. It's good to have your key "phrase" in a heading and in your title as well as used several times elsewhere on the page. Your product descriptions should have the best phrase that describes them and that will appear on your category pages just fine. When you create (or maintain) a page, put your key phrase(s) in your description, but don't forget the sales pitch. The description is often what appears on your listing in the SERPs. Go ahead and do the keyword thing; a few search engines still pay attention to them, but their importance is dying fast.

Don't overuse your phrase(s) to the point you start sounding silly. The first and primary purpose of each page is to sell something. If you spend a lot of time and money getting people to visit your site, you'll have wasted it, if they take one look at a mess and leave. If you really overuse your phrase, the search engines will actually penalize you (but there is no clearcut "ratio" in spite of what you may have read).

Remember, if "everybody knows" something, it probably isn't true. There are a lot of myths about SEO floating around and 3/4 of them fit that category.

Thanks...but I'm really interested in finding out how to make this technique work. It certainly will make a difference in our product pages....

Try putting a textual description of your site at the top of your page, above your banner image, using H1 tags and styles to control size. We have one that is flush left and flush right. It looks like slogans to our customers. We do very well on the keywords embedded within.

We also write those left side product category links strategically to highlight our keywords. If you use custom html, you can group your product catgegory links under descriptive groupings, with those groupings including your keywords.