by Irene Lizarraga

Created on: July 29, 2010   Last Updated: August 19, 2010

Designing search engine spider-friendly code is one of the very first things that can be done to optimize a website for the search engines. A search engine spider reads the HTML code of a website and uses it to find what keywords are more relevant on a specific page and how important they are compared to the rest of keywords on that page. So, if you want to optimize your website for SEO the first step is making sure that HTML code is SEO optimized and spider-friendly.

Use standard (X)HTML code that validates
You can compare the W3C markup validator to a spellchecker for HTML code. If your HTML code cannot pass the test the result is some browsers displaying your website wrong, and search engines suffering from parse errors and maybe even missing some content. Making sure  your HTML or XHTML code follows the standards and best practices will make your code much more search engine spider friendly, and will improve your visitor’s user experience. You can also use the W3C CSS validator to check that your CSS files are also well coded, and will be understood by any of the most popular browsers in the market. It’s worth mentioning that HTML code generated by tools such as MS Word or Frontpage just won’t validate without extensive work.

Move the  CSS and Javascript to external, referenced files
Making your HTML files as small as possible is not only good for search engine spiders, but also to reduce bandwidth costs and the loading time of a page. The easiest way of doing this is avoiding in-line styles or javascript, and moving all of your CSS and Javascript to external files that will be referenced within the head of the HTML document.  Besides making for easier code maintenance and faster loading times, embedding styles and javascript files has a direct effect on Search Engines, since they have a limit on how many characters on each page will they read. While it’s generally accepted to have very specific snippets of Javascript only on the HTML pages that uses it, including all the CSS and Javascript code at the beginning of a web page can cause a Search Engine spider to reach its reading limit and not parse the end of the document, which generally is more keyword rich than any style-sheet.

Don’t use tables unless you want to display tabled information
Tables went out of fashion several years ago, and it was for a reason. First of all, they clutter your HTML code reducing the keyword density of your content that you worked

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>