The first step in the Design Chemical 88-point SEO process is to make sure that the webpages are coded properly. If we’re dealing with an existing site this will quickly reveal if it is worth repairing or needs a complete overhaul or replacement.
Why is it important to have proper code? If a page displays okay, isn’t that what really matters? Spiders don’t like bad code. The goal of Search Engine Optimization is to make it easy for search engine spiders (Googlebot etc) to understand your site – they are determined to know what’s the content and where is it. Once they know that they also evaluate your Quality Score. Improperly coded sites will stop spiders, or at least frustrate them, from navigating through the text and linking to other pages. If they can’t read it, they don’t know what it’s about, and can’t give you a good score, or make sure you rank well for your relevant content. When terms are used such as ‘indexed by search engines’ it means they have been crawled and evaluated by the search engine.
It is really surprising just how much sloppy code writing is still being used. The two biggest culprits of bad code are 1) Flash, and 2) tables. Of course lazy and/or inexperienced web developers can wreck just about anything if they aren’t careful.
Flash – it might look nice, but it really should be avoided. It doesn’t get indexed, it is usually slow to load on a page which frustrates visitors, it is seldom interactive, and it is very difficult to edit to keep it updated and fresh.
Tables – the old way of coding pages – lots of reasons tables aren’t used by modern web developers – but for Search Engine Optimization it often comes down to content being deep within ‘nested’ tables. Meaning your good content is buried deep in table code that spiders just don’t like to deal with. Tables add a lot of unnecessary code to sites that makes it hard for spiders to string together sentences and makes sense of your content. They typically don’t index deeper than 4 nested tables – most table sites are much worse than that – 8, 1o, 14 tables deep. Forget getting ranked for that…
More about code in future updates. Thanks for visiting.
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