Simple Page Construction

Before you can worry about SEO and getting your site indexed you have to ensure that the site itself is indexable.

Key skills are the ability to write clean HTML and to use CSS effectively. This doesn’t mean that you have to adopt tableless design or to be a design guru – but the sites do have to be well written.

If you are using a CMS you may need to make compromises in order to use the tool effectively. The bulk of the site, though, should be made with well structured HTML.

• Javascript is held in a separate file
• Stylesheets are held in a separate file
• <H>, <Strong> and <I> tags are used sparingly, but with killer accuracy.
• Styles are applied as high up in the document as possible so that tags need not be repeated, chewing up precious bandwidth eg
  [html]

  This happened

  That happened

  [/html]
  and not
  [html]

  This happened

  That happened

  [/html]
  In the long run your pages will be much “lighter”, in some cases they will be 30% of their previous size.

• Use Stylesheets, not javascript, for rollovers. Study the case studies at alistapart.com and see just what can be done with the stylesheet – it’s quite amazing!
• Use Meta tags wisely, don’t spam and make sure they are different on each page.

These rules apply equally to dynamic or generated sites. They are no different, in all cases HTML is sent to the browser, or to the search engine spider.

And if the spider can’t read the site easily then the rest of your efforts will be wasted.