Page Coding is incredibly important for search engine optimization. Although coding determines how your website looks and operates - to a search engine spider, your site may look completely different than to a human. Although your site may look aesthetically pleasing, a search engine spider doesn't care what color scheme is used and your site will not rank based on its eye candy factor alone.
Below are some of the major factors we'll be looking for when evaluating your website for SEO-friendly page coding:
SEO friendly coding practices make it easier for the search engines to crawl your website, and determine where to place your website. We also take a look at the code to content ratio. You want to be sure that on each page of your website (particularly the homepage) you have significantly more content than code. If you don't have enough content on your website, the search engines won't think your site is very important.
Below is a break-down of some of the major coding factors:
The World Wide Web Consortium is where the commonly used web acronym W3C originates. The World Wide Web Consortium is a volunteer organization of experts, which started in 1996 in order to officially decide web coding (mark up) standards. They created a tool which will automatically tell you if your website is compliant with their standards. These standards were based on best practices for getting spidered as well as creating the most extensible (scalable) code. Try out their validation tool, which also reveals what errors must be amended in order to be complaint with their standards.
Cascading Style Sheets is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG and XUL. Commonly abbreviated CSS, you can also check the validation of the CSS by using the W3C's CSS validation tool. A page that validates should be easily read by a search engine.
Having unnecessary code behind the scenes can make it harder for spiders to parse through. Some may reach its pre-programmed conditions, signaling it to leave, stay, or go deeper. A good rule of thumb is to keep the content to a 1 to 3 ratio, meaning three times as much content as code.
All Javascript and as much CSS as possible should be moved to external files -- .js or .css files. Pre-cascading style sheets (CSS), designers and programs use tables for coding. Tables take up a lot more room, as do full CSS commands. As website coding has become more streamlined, SEs are preferring the more modern, lighter style.
The main text should be as high as possible on the page in the coding, even if it does not appear that way on the page. This can be done using CSS.
Minimal use of deprecated or outdated HTML. When a new version of HTML comes out (they are up to 3), an older mark up tag may not render as expected in all browsers. Tables are another outdated coding structure. They can be replaced by using tableless CSS design.
Go back to How to Get Better Organic Search Results.