I'm in the process of building a website (many things are still not functioning), but I'm now adressing look and feel. I would like to have space reserved for ads in my php templates. Is it enough to just add a <div class='advertisement'> and use standard CSS to hold the position?
I know this will work for my purposes, howver I am woundering if once Google crawls my site in future will require less work to have ads displaying.
p.s. I have also readthrough Google's guidlines on where ads should be placed and hava a differnet look then rest of page Just woundering if I'm missing something.
If you use <div class='advertisement'></div> (with no content between the tags) and set the dimensions of the element in CSS, this is sufficient for reserving space, and Google sees it as empty (as it is) and ignores it, until you put some content there. There is no way, and no need, to inform Google about the future content of the page.
If you wish to insert some dummy content into the element, like “Advertize here” (which is really an ad of a kind) or “Reserved for ads”, that’s OK. It may help you during development and evaluation. Whether they are OK for real pages when launched needs to be considered carefully. But to search engines, that would be just content, and probably not relevant – it does not no much harm, but neither does it help. (We don’t expect people to search for such things, do we?)