| Clean Design
A clean and uncluttered design is usually a win-win
situation for both your visitors and the search
engines. The simplest and most cleanly coded websites
are usually the ones that are visited and crawled
the most, since many people know that they will
find what they are looking for and where to find
it; they usually are repeat visitors as well. Search
engines also like to crawl sites that are not heavy
on their resources. Anytime a search engine has
to wade through a website in order to find the content,
it taxes the search bot’s resources, and may
make it spider the site less often.
Cleanly coded and compliant HTML makes for easier
development for the next web designer to make changes
to content. Being able to find your way around someone
else’s code is important to new inductees
having to look at a page for the first time. Being
able to find their way around makes it easier for
proofreading, editing, updating content, and fixing
site issues that may prevent spidering or ranking
well.
Extra tags - It’s also my belief that the
<font> tag will soon be deprecated, with the
popularity and more browsers conforming to CSS standards.
Other tags like <b> and <i> and others
are already being replaced with other tags, but
in a text to code ratio analysis, all those HTML
tags will affect these ratios considerably. Keeping
them to a minimum is in your best interest. For
example, instead of a tag for a table cell looking
like this:
<td><td width=”350” height=”200”><td
align=”center”>
It should be more like this:
<td width=”350” height=”200”
align=”center”>
There are many situations where using an HTML editor,
like FrontPage, will add in those extra tags if
you make changes at a later time, whereas other
editors like DreamWeaver will group them together
for you. Consolidating these tags are not only more
search engine friendly, but it enables you to create
cleaner code for easier updating later.
Scripts – I talked earlier
about using JavaScript links or links embedded in
a Frames layout being difficult for search engines
to follow. But also, all that code in the <head>
section and throughout the body of your web page
can make crawling more resource intensive for a
search engine. It may look incredible, but if search
engines don’t want to crawl and index the
page, it doesn’t help people find your pages.
Plus, all that code clutters up your pages. It’s
better for you to offload your code to an external
file if at all possible, like with JavaScript or
CSS styles.
CSS - CSS, or Cascading Style
Sheets, is a very search engine friendly language,
because many times CSS is put into external files,
since search engines seem to disregard the CSS styling
anyways. There really is no reason to keep CSS styles
within the <head> section of your web page
when you can easily reference the external style
sheet in the page, and keeping your code tidy and
your text to code ratios more in tac
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