Coding
In addition to site architecture, coding plays an important role in the success of SEO. Since search engines are unable to see the graphical elements that make up a majority of the experience presented to human visitors, code must be engineered in a logical, friendly way to search engine spiders.
Key Element 1:
Code-to-content ratio
- Code to content is a signifier of clean code (and therefore quick loading times)
Example: http://ratio.nuff-respec.com/
W3C: The Markup Validation Service is a validator by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that allows Internet users to check HTML documents for conformance to HTML or XHTML standards. It also provides a quick method for web page authors to check their posted pages for mark-up errors.
Key Element 2:
Number of W3C validation errors on page
- The volume of W3C can signify clean code and avoid coding errors that may cause engines to ignore blocks of content.
Key Element 3:
Filesize of html pages
- While filesize is relative, search engines seem to have a preference for smaller filesizes in rankings. Longer pages are also sometimes truncated by search engines during indexing. Filesize can also affect pageload times and code-to-content ratio.
Key Element 4:
Page load times (including number
of calls per page)
Page load times can be monitored using the following tools:
- Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
- YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
- WebPagetest, which shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.
Site Performance, A Google Webmaster Tool, which shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world.
Key Element 5:
Microformats
Microformats make summary information appear in search results
- Event Information
- Rich Snippets Testing Tool
Canonical URLs: URL normalization (or URL canonicalization) is the process by which URLs are modified and standardized in a consistent manner. The goal of the normalization process is to transform a URL into a normalized or canonical URL so it is possible to determine if two syntactically different URLs may be equivalent.
