Coding for Search Engines

The Title tag is key. Each page must have its own descriptive Title tag that matches the topic of the page exactly. This text appears whenever someone bookmarks the page, and it provides important information for the search engines. Remember that Meta keyword tags are nearly useless these days but are known to be somewhat helpful when the content of the page strongly supports those keywords. Be selective with what you put in that tag. Don’t waste time calculating density and meeting Meta keyword character specifications. Just focus on backing up the actual content on the page, or using synonyms and misspellings.

Put most important things up top. One of the easiest ways to satisfy search engines and users is to quickly get to the point of a page by designing it like a pyramid. Put the most important information at the very top of the page, in text or text links that go to top-level pages. Content should be placed so that the most important, useful information is at or near the top of the page. The least important information and links should be lower on the page.

Place Cascading Style Sheets and JavaScript into separate files rather than having the script on the page. Otherwise, it could interfere with the crawlers’ ability to quickly find keywords within your content. Watch out for JavaScript that is used for navigation menus that special-needs users can never see and search engines cannot follow.

WYSIWYG editors. Be extra careful with “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) HTML editors. The generic code they create will often not meet the needs of all users or search engines.

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