Coding Your Website with Search Engine Optimization in Mind
- Semil Shah
- July 26, 2013
Content marketing is a $118 billion dollar business, according to Salesforce. For many companies, content marketing strategies are the cornerstone of their Internet marketing strategy. But the effectiveness of on-site content marketing is diminished if you aren’t coding your sites with search engine optimization in mind. When you’re coding a website from the ground up, incorporate the best design practices for SEO as they often benefit the overall coding structure of your site, as well.
Separate Presentation and Content
You can include all of your web design presentation code and your website content on the same page, but it creates a very hostile environment for proper search engine optimization. Since the header code and other design elements end up being seen by the search engine crawlers first, you use more bandwidth to load the additional code. It also is more difficult to maintain the page since everything is jumbled together into the same document. You can separate these elements with cascading style sheets where all of your presentation information, such as the size and style of your fonts, goes into a single document linked to from the web page. This way, you eliminate a great deal of coding that would have been on the page, and you cut down on bandwidth cost, because you use that same single file with the rest of the site.
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Clean Code
To make your website as usable and search engine-friendly as possible, make your HTML as clean and error-free as possible. Not only does this cut down on the amount of random errors and problems, it also makes your site look the same across multiple browsers. Cross-compatibility issues tend to upset designers and customers alike, especially if you’re choosing to move from simple designs, like the one at WebHostingBlueBook.com, to a complicated website with many graphical elements.
Meta Data
Your page title and meta description provides information about your website and each individual page to search engines. You want to provide a good amount of information, including keywords relevant to your site, so the search engines can categorize you and rank you for your market segment. Many content management systems have plug-ins that create this data for you.
Utilize Content Delivery Networks
Content delivery networks, or CDNs, are typically cloud-based content storage hosts that deliver your content to users. CDN’s cut down on the time it takes your site to load. Internet surfers are impatient. It won’t take any time for them to go to another website if your content takes too long to load. Instead of investing in high-end servers to host files on, it makes more sense to go with a CDN.
What SEO tips for web design do you have? Share them in the comments.
About the Author
My name’s Semil Shah, and I pride myself on being the last digital marketer that you’ll ever need. Having worked internationally across agile and disruptive teams from San Fransico to London, I can help you take what you are doing in digital to a whole next level.