HTML Tips to Optimize Your Site for Search
This article will focus on some simple tips that will improve the quality of your HTML for product landing pages, mini-sites, blogs, or websites. These tips become even more helpful if you are running an organic SEO campaign, (As opposed to PPC) although they are generally good web design principles to follow regardless of what type of campaign you are running.
Tip 1. Separate Your Content from your Presentation With CSS
Although the majority of web pages these days use CSS style sheets, there are some web designers out there that refuse to make the change and code using tables. Although table based websites were awesome in 1998 and will still be read by most browsers, using CSS will significantly clean up your code, thus making it easier for search engine spiders to crawl your site and index its contents. Ultimately, that is what we all want. Pages that are easy to crawl and content that will end up on search engines.
HTML code Using tables
<table>
<tr>
<th bgcolor=”#CC9900”><h1 align=”center”>This is an example Headline</h1> </th><td colspan=2><p>This is some example text</p></td>
<td><p>Some more example text</p></td>
</tr>
</table>
HTML Code using CSS (presentation elements moved to a separate CSS file)
<div>
<h1>This is an example Headline </h1>
<p>This is some example text</p>
<p> Some more example text</p>
</div>
See how much less cluttered your code can be when you use CSS? Isn’t the second example much easier to read? Search engine spiders think so too!
Other reasons for using CSS are:
- Smaller file sizes (faster loading websites).
- Some table-based code is no longer considered valid. Elements like “align=center” or “bgcolor=”#CC9900” will no longer pass validation tests.
- easier to make site-wide style changes
- more flexibility in layout designs
Tip 2. Use relevant Keywords (in your page Title, your <h> tags, your <a> tags, your ALT tags , and your filenames!)
Although Search Engine algorithms are usually top-secret, there are several elements that are known to be important factors in the equation. They are: Your Page title, your header tags, your link (<a>) tags, your image ALT tags and your filenames. Placing important keywords in these locations will improve your search engine rankings because they are typically the most descriptive elements in your site (and hence given more importance by search engines). Now, that doesn’t mean you should go and put a hundred keywords in each of these locations, but making sure that you include some keywords here will ultimately make your webpage more ‘relevant’ for those keywords, and improve your ranking over competing sites that don’t do this.
Placing keywords in your image ALT tags and filenames will also increase the likelihood that your images (and site) will appear in image searches.
Example:
URL: www.joesaffiliatewidgetemporium/widgetsforsale.htm
<title> Joe’s Affiliate Widget Emporium – Cheap Widgets for sale </title>
<h1> Looking for Widgets? Joe’s has the best Widget Prices Anywhere! </h1>
<img src=”bestwidget.jpg” Alt= “Click to download this useful widget”>
Click this link for the best <a href=”#”> Widgets </a> on the ‘net
Tip 3. Stay Up to date on current best-practices
As the net changes and becomes ever-more-complex, old best practices fall out of favor. It is in your interest to stay up to date on what’s new and what’s useful. Here are some great web design links that will ensure you are not out of the loop.
http://www.smashingmagazine.com - The net’s leading web design blog
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters?hl=en – Google’s webmaster help forum
http://validator.w3.org - W3C HTML Validator, to make sure your code is up to snuf
http://www.w3schools.com – All sorts of useful HTML tutorials are found here!
