Last week I covered the importance of keyword research before you begin optimizing your website. This week I’ll be explaining the basics of creating a search engine friendly architecture.
Step 2: Your Website Structure
If you are starting with a brand new website, making sure your website is built in a search engine friendly architecture is an important piece of the puzzle to get right. Be sure your code is clean and concise. Google, just like people, will read and follow your the information on your website more often if the content is laid out in a straightforward manner.
When referring to a “search engine friendly architecture” I’m mainly talking about how the code is written on the actual pages. To see what the search engines are viewing go to the top of your browser, click on View then Page Source. Ideally you should be able to read through the code and have a basic understanding of where the parts of your website are, such as the navigation, content and images. If your code is difficult to read and follow, the search engines will have a more difficult time as well.
Your website should validate at W3C (http://validator.w3.org/) although this is not completely necessary for good rankings, it does help with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance and ensuring your code is well formatted. Some 3rd party tools such as Facebook plug-ins and Javascript use code that is not part of the standard HTML library and can cause the page to not validate. Don’t worry about correcting these issues as they provide other functionality you are looking to keep.
One of the most important areas of a website that developers tend to overlook is the website “head” <head>…</head>. In between the head tags is where your page contains its Javascript, CSS and META tags for the page. Since the data in these tags doesn’t show up on the actual display of the website this area tends to get ignored and can become unnecessarily large. All CSS and Javascript code should be referencing external files. This not only speeds up the load time of the website (which is becoming more important to Google’s algorithms) it also makes editing the code later easier.
To load your CSS from an external file your code should look something like this:
<link href="/path-to-css-file/filename.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
A similar approach should be done with any Javascript on your site. The code for loading a Javascript file should look something like this:
<script language="javascript" src="/path-to-js-file/filename.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
As with everything there are exceptions to the rule, plug-ins usually cannot but included in an external file, you will need to place them in the code where you want the plug-in to display.
Finally we come to the meat of the website, the body tag <body>…</body>. Between these two tags is what your visitors will see on screen. This is also where the majority of your on-site SEO will take place. In keeping with a search engine friendly architecture your site should make proper use of the HTML tags.
Rather than building your website with tables you should use div tags modified with CSS (CSS based layouts). Although tables can produce a similar result on screen as a CSS based layout, the code to create the same functionality with a table can be 3-4 times as large. While this may not seem like a big deal for a small page, but if you have a lot of tables or complex nested tables your page size can grow out of control quickly. Remember: the more code a page has the longer it will take to load, affecting its results in the search engines.
Be sure to understand and use the text modifications tags properly, such as “H1-H6”, “em” and “strong”. Each of these tags have their place in the site and should not be used just to decorate the text. If you need to make the text a different size, do that through your CSS file.
So to recap, your website needs to have a good foundation for your search engine optimization efforts to be most successful. You can build a building on sand but it won’t be as sturdy as if you built it on stone. The same applies to your website, a good foundation makes it easier for the search engines to read and understand your site.
Related posts:
