Search Engine Optimisation Tips | C2 Web Design

Having a spring clean

When search engines visit your website they do not see the same thing you do. All they see is the coding that makes up your website. The code needs to be clean and straight forward for the search engines to accurately follow.

Please read the following two sentences and see which one makes most sense:

1. One a rarely website coded one sees one a rarely sees one coded better sees website a one better rarely coded sees

2. One rarely sees a better coded website

Now obviously the second sentence makes more sense - but quite often websites are written as jumbled as sentence 1. The search engines have just as difficult a time wading through the invalid coding, nested tables and images without ALT tags, for the good, rich, content of the site.

One way around this is to tidy the HTML coding on your site. A professional website designer will be able to assess this more accurately and strip out the duplicated and unnecessary coding (often left behind by WYSIWYG editors, e.g. FrontPage, Dreamweaver etc...) - but there is a way to do this yourself (although results are not always 100%) by using a tool that can detect bad coding and suggest ways to correct - try http://flumpcakes.co.uk/css/html-tidy/. This tool will examine the coding on your website and try to look for duplicated/unnecessary tags.

The results are displayed for you to action yourself, or get a website designer to clean the code for you.

By cleaning your website code you help the search engines capture and list your site much better and hopefully reward you for your hard work!

This process strips out unnecessary tags, helps search engines and quite importantly (although often overlooked) reduces the file size of your website. This makes your site quicker to load.

One note of caution, if you intend to do the work yourself create a backup copy of your website before making the changes. With all software it basis the results on a pre-coded formula (instead of manually checking) so by testing out the changes on a copy of your website you can always revert to the original if the coding you have changed affects the overall functionality of your site.

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