Importance of Valid Coding in Search Engine Optimization :: Part 2

by Bill Marshall
of http://www.oyster-web.co.uk

Last updated: 11 Sep 2007

Nowadays the big movement in web design is to abandon the ever more complicated code based on endless nested tables, spacer gifs, and visual tricks, and go instead with simple basic code that defines the Content (and looks more like the old days of Netscape 2), but with the crucial added ingredient of CSS to define not just the immediate visual aspects such as the font colours and backgrounds but also the layout and positioning (known as CSS-P). Naturally this requires the effort of learning the sometimes complex techniques of CSS, and perhaps for some designers this may seem a distraction from the day-to-day business of building sites, but the benefits in leaner, faster, clearer, and more adaptable sites is well worth this effort.

The SEO bonus and the Business Advantages

Search engines like clean code. The fewer errors that they run into the easier it is for them to traverse your site and Index it efficiently. They also like a high text-to-code ratio so the simpler and more elegant the code is, the easier they can get at the text which they need to analyse in order to ascertain your keyword phrases and rank your pages.

Building websites in this way makes it a lot easier to write code that will not only remain functional whatever the developments in browser technology and be viewable across the widest possible range of browsers, but will also be a sound base for displaying in other formats such as the small screens of PDAs and mobile phones. Additionally the validation process weeds out a lot of code which may be a problem for screen readers and thus helps towards making sites accessible for people with visual difficulties - which is now a legal requirement and likely to be a source of trouble for many sites over the next few years.

Part 1 of Validation and its importance to Search Engine Optimisation

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