The importance of clean code
Written by Fergal Donlon Thu Apr 14th 14:44 2011
Most people who look at a website judge the book by it's cover. The importance of the underlying code is rarely considered in terms of SEO while keyword analysis and content is given all the attention.
The layout, size, layout and cleanliness of your html code is just as important as doing things like keyword analysis and submitting to search engines. We are not going to name examples of bad coding - there are plenty out there and indeed sites we did a long time ago may have many issues that were not issues at the time. However new rules come along and things change - SEO is something that needs to be watched all the time.
Some of the criteria that a search engine robot will look for are:
- Text, text, text, and some more text
- The density of certain keywords
- What is marked as headings - H1 down to H5
- Chunks of text that are keyword rich
- Links and titles on the links
- Page Title tags and other meta tags in your header
- Alt tags on images
- Frames tag if using Frames
Nobody sits down and works out the page rank for keywords. However when a Search Engine tries to index your site which do you think it is going to rank higher - the one that has clean easy to read code or the one the has chunks of unnecessary, messy code.
A site can look lovely but it's only when you look at the underlying code can you tell if it is beautiful on the inside.
Online wizards and other WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) editors will often generate messy and inefficient code, full of errors and repetitions. We don't use wizards or quick editors. We write insanely clean and valid HTML code.
Comments
Posted by:
Zeal on Tue Aug 23 00:54
This is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks for wrtiing!
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