Effective SEO Through Good HTML

For an SEO strategy to be effective, it's not enough to focus on optimization points like page titles, keywords, and meta descriptions. Search engines also look at the structure of the coding. HTML code that can't be indexed by the search engine crawlers, or which creates infinite loops or other problems could affect your rankings directly.

Improving your HTML code from an SEO perspective can make a big difference.

Improving the coding has nothing to do with meeting web standards, see World Wide Web Consortium. It's more important to find a balance between usability and performance, without sacrificing either one. Here are some basic coding and site structure aspects you can improve to give your search engine optimization strategy a lift.

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SEO TIP: Avoid 404 Error Pages

Linking to documents or URLs that return the 404 error page might adversely impact your search rankings. In many cases, the error page shows up for webpages that were moved or deleted. These “broken links” may cause a crawler to leave your site. The search engines will not continue to index your site if it runs into a number of broken links.

The best SEO strategy against having broken links is to prevent it from happening. You can greatly improve the optimization and user friendliness of your site by creating a custom 404 error page, or using a 301 (Moved Permanently) response code on moved or deleted URLs to guide the visitor back to the site.

SEO TIP: Place JavaScript and CSS into External Files

Because search engines only read a certain amount of information on a webpage, it is important to increase the ratio of web content to HTML coding. If you have too much HTML, the more important SEO content will be overlooked.

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By placing JavaScript and CSS coding in separate external files, you will reduce the volume of code and improve the content-to-code ratio. This also lessens the chances of having badly formatted code on your webpages, which can negatively impact your SEO efforts.

SEO TIP: Fix as Many HTML Errors as Possible

Search engines don't rank websites that have compliant HTML code higher. However, having valid coding does make it easier for the crawler to “read” your webpages. Using a W3 HTML validator can go a long away in checking the validity of your code and detecting unforeseen problems.

To have a successful SEO strategy, it is imperative to the aspects presented here. It will go towards having a long term search engine optimization campaign that will help your website stay at top of the search rankings for an extended period of time.

Article Published January 16th, 2009
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