Easy On-Site Search Engine Optimization

What Goes on Under the Hood?

SEO may not be as familiar as some people would like to think. With all the hype surrounding SEO, starting a campaign to increase your search engine ranking includes dealing with various elements of a web document and bringing them together to produce a high quality product, compelling web content, and a high ranking page on search engines. In this part, let us look at the conventions of SEO elements that every content developer should know.

Validating HTML for SEO-compliant pages

Among the critical elements of SEO is the compliance of programming languages to the standards set by various bodies. These organizations draw web standards to ensure that web documents follow a flexible layout and rules that will contribute to overall quality of web pages. HTML and XML-derived validation is handled by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Validation checking works like a spell-check or grammar-check for programmers. HTML validation is a rigid process since the code was created with a specific platform in mind – in this case, internet browsers.

Budding web designers are better off learning compliant HTML from the get-go. Composing a web-compliant HTML will make sure that your website will look the same across most browsers. It is not enough to get your website up and running. Compliant HTML means that you have a clean code from your source, freely readable by other programmers and other scripts such as SEO spiders. A validated HTML code will allow SEO spiders to read your code without error. If your code is not compliant, the SEO spider will skip over your page which results to less search engine listings.

File Naming Conventions for SEO
File naming conventions refers to a developer’s preference in naming web pages and the files related to these pages. A page’s file name is the first element that search engine spiders will look at, so it is important that you place high ranking keywords to your file name. You should place effective file names early into the project because once a search engine has indexed your page, it is not advised to change file names. The file names should not only associate high ranking keywords, but should also tell something on the specific content of your web page.

When naming a file name with spaces, it is recommended to use a dash instead (-) of underscores (_). While they are valid separators to the human eye, search engines treat the two very differently. Google and other search engines view underscores as part of the word while they see dashes as word separators. You can also extend the use of dashes in creating a multi-word domain name. For example, red-dog.com is more SEO friendly than reddog.com. The same rule should also be applied to content that calls for files in your source like images, and videos.

Character Set Tags
There are many tags associated with the HTML header. Since this is the part of the code that is not directly rendered by the browser, coders tend to be sloppy with this part. However, this section contributes greatly to the viability of your webpage in terms of SEO.

The first tag that should be placed in the header is the character set attribute. This tag defines the character set used in the page. Like text documents, a defined character set will let your browser know how you intend to store or transmit your data and what logic you prefer to apply to manipulate your text. Thus, it defines the “nature of the text” in your website. Meta robots tags are supported by major search engines.

Check if the character set tag is the first item in your HTML header. By doing this, you can direct the engine spider how to read the texts before you start parsing your page. Failure to do so will result in confusion of characters and may hurt your search engine results.