October 7, 2006 We shall now go into the actual code of your site. «Code» is used loosely here as HTML is actually a mark-up language, but we aren’t here to talk that. HTML is the language used to create your website. Even if you have a software that makes a site in a strictly interface or visual environment, it still makes HTML in some fashion, whether you see it or not. Knowing SEO doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to know HTML like the back of your hand, but it certainly helps to at least know some of the basics. If you wanna good beginning tutorial about HTML or a few other website development languages, check out Tizag. When a search engine looks at your site, there are a lot of variables that go into the determination of your ranking. One thing can be how well your site is written. Well, not so much that, but how few errors and problems your code creates. You will want to try to be mindful of what tags and methods are accepted, and which ones are not. You don’t want to make use of any methods that keep a search engine from seeing everything on your site. This can make them loose faith in your page and in return give you a lower ranking than the next guy. You can check out the latest of the accepted methods by visiting w3.org. It can really be as simple as having too much code where code is not needed. This is one thing to be mindful when creating a website in any sort of point-and-click environment like Dreamweaver or Front Page. These are both decent products, but create a lot of unnecessary code that will slow or stop a search engine browser. This will also affect your loading time, and that can bug a potential customer into leaving your site before you get a chance to show your goods. One of the first things to be sure of is the Doctype. The Doctype is mandatory for most mark-up languages. It is an explanation of the type of language used in the site for the search engine browser. You will want to make sure that you are including the appropriate Doctype, which can be validated here at w3.org. HTML should also be kept «clean.» What I mean by this, is make sure that you don’t have a lot of code that is not doing anything and has absolutely no need. Make things easy to read. As complex as the program that determines ranking is, the crawler is very simple. It can’t go through too much work to get the information it needs, so don’t try to make it. This is also true for the content on your page. Try to get to the good stuff as soon in your code as possible. This will show to the search engines faster and make things easier on them…those lazy crawlers. Hmmm….perhaps my kids learned this from Google. Don’t make repeating movements like trying to bold an H1 tag. It’s already bold and it won’t help you to double it up.

CSS is a very good way to manage the layout of your site easily and effectively. CSS will also help to keep your code clean as you can keep a separate CSS file that your page will call to for design information. Make use of this as much as you can. And try to make use of the external CSS when at all possible. Putting CSS in the HEAD of the site adds a lot of code, and thus making for a messy bed. More on learning CSS can also be found on Tizag.

JavaScript is also a great language that can give your site that extra spice it needs. JS is used a lot for pretty buttons and flashy things, but is also cool for actions like games and such. This can also be called from another file often and should be. If you have to use some in the HEAD of your site, try to make sure it is below your meta information. An error in either CSS or JS can cause a search engine to not even see what comes after it.

It’s a good idea to be sure that your site is acceptable by the search engines browsers. A good tool to check for errors and warning can be found here at Site Report Card. You don’t want any errors at all, and as few warnings as possible. Things like Flash and some other methods aren’t really covered, so may show as a warning. But not likely an error, so a warning here and there might be OK. You really want to score a 10 all across the board.

Again, a lot of «easy» website development programs are great for the beginner. But if you want to do the best for your site that you can, it would really help to learn a little HTML and CSS. Perhaps build what you want with a simple-to-use creator, and go through the code with a little knowledge and clean what you can. It will help a great deal and make you SEO life a lot easier.

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