When building out your website, it is particularly important to be sure the code is correct and well-formed. As discussed in the Introduction to URLs blog post, correctly structured code ensures Web pages can be indexed properly by search engines, which is vital to ranking at the top of the natural results.  For this reason, it is imperative to ensure your code structure is correctly developed to compliment and improve your SEO campaign.

To begin with, be sure that all tags are properly closed and source code that may be confusing to the search engine spiders isn’t used. Spiders will typically be thrown off by old or outdated code or code that is proprietary to a single browser as well as code that is too new to be recognized by most spiders.

Remember, spiders are computer programs that abide by all the limitations of a predefined and pre-programmed set of rules. Most abide by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an organization that strives to set specifications and guidelines to help the Web run to its fullest potential. If your Web pages do not also work within those rules, they run the risk of being improperly indexed by the search engines—or not being indexed at all—causing serious damage to your site’s rankings and SEO results. No SEO efforts will matter if your site is not indexed. It is also helpful to visit Google Webmaster Guidelines which will give insight on how to help Google correctly find, index and rank your site.

As you can see, taking the time to ensure search engine spiders can easily process your site’s code is well worth the effort. It allows the indexing process to work as smoothly as possible, thus allowing you to spend your optimization efforts where they are most needed instead of worrying about technical, programming issues. For those who may not be wizards at writing code, you can test your Web pages with the HTML validator at http://validator.w3.org.

Note:  in order for your pages to validate, use a valid DOCTYPE which allows spiders to easily parse and browsers to easily process your site.  As such, it both helps your optimization efforts as well as making your site compatible with a larger number of browsers, resulting in a slight performance boost for your site and reassurance that your pages are compatible across a greater number of browsers.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 at 12:38 pm and is filed under SEM Tutorial, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Site Architecture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.