A website’s HTML coding is most often overlooked both by their owners and designers. It is just as important as keyword research and application, link popularity or search engine submission. The size, appearance, cleanliness and semantics of a web page’s HTML coding are important factors of good website design.
Search engine spiders or robots can read and decipher only two web page elements: the actual HTML markup and the text (ASCII) containing the page’s main content. How a page is coded could mean the difference between rank #1 and rank #14.
What Search Engine Robots Look For
Every search engine has its own preferences but what you’ll want to look at are what Google wants. In terms of page size, Google likes small pages with lots of text (with substantial keyword ratio of course).
The less script-dependent a page is the prettier it gets in the eyes of Google. Dynamic page generation tools and languages help improve how a page handles data or even how it looks but having too much of them will affect the page’s optimization value. Like it or not, good website design these days means “search engine optimized”.
Here are some of the things that search engines look for and love in a website:
- Lots of text with good keyword density. Note that this does not necessarily mean that mentioning more keywords is good. Google can smell keyword stuffing a mile away.
- Links with link titles. This is good for accessibility and usability too. Link titles are the little text bubbles that pop up when you hover your mouse over a hyperlink on a page.
- Semantic code. Search engines gauge a page’s value based on how effectively HTML tags are used, i.e. proper H1 to H5 hierarchy, using the STRONG tag instead of the B tag, or the EM tag instead of the I tag. Reserve the H1 tag for the title of the page’s main content.
- Alternate or alt text. Robots cannot “see” images like people do. To let them know what an image is about, make use of alternate text. This is also good for accessibility and usability. For better results, include your keyword in the text (just make sure it’s in the same context as the rest of the text).
- Meta tags at the top of the document. Keep them away from the middle and the bottom of the HTML document. Make sure your “keywords” and “description” attributes are filled in.
- Optimized filenames. This is yet another chance for you to add another instance of your niche keyword. For instance, instead of naming one of your pages as “article201.html”, use the article’s keyword optimized title instead, just separate the words with a dash (“-“). For instance for this article’s page you can use “exceptional-website-design-is-your-code-optimized-for-search-engines.html” with “website design” as my keyword. Do the same for images you want to include in your pages.
Those are some of the things search engines like Google love in a web page. Also, whether you’re a site owner or a web designer, make sure to validate your HTML coding. Most validators will let you know if your tags are used or spelled properly. After all, validating HTML coding as a habitual practice is an essential part of website design.
