A technically sound site should be your first goal in search engine optimization. If your web site is not search engine friendly, you could miss out on being fully indexed or even ignored by the search engines.
The first step you must take when making your web site readily accessible to search engines is code structure.
If the search engine spider has to crawl through many megabytes of code before it ever reaches content, it may just leave.
Solutions:
- Use cascading style sheets (css) for as much code as possible.
- Place content above code whenever possible.
- Condense code - there are javascript code crunchers available.
- Clean up source code so there isn’t a lot of extraneous code or whitespace.
These changes will make your site spider friendly - and keep it ranking well on the web.
Update: I found a great little program that will strip your code of excess markup. It’s called Detagger. It’s not free, but there is a 30 day trial period, and the $29.95 price tag is reasonable.
Popularity: 18% [?]
Tags: search engine optimization, search engine rankings, SEO, web site code
