Optimizing HTML for Maximum SEO Compliance

Search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing can send your Web site massive amounts of traffic. Optimizing your Web pages' HTML source code is key to allowing search engines scrape your pages content, index them and start sending your site traffic. Here are a few tips and tricks to maximizing the effectiveness of your HTML source code for search engine's readability.

Source Code Validation:
Make sure to run your entire site through an HTML validator. The best free one that exists lives at http://validator.w3.org/ and can even be accessed through a few FireFox extensions directly. Running your site through this validator ensures that your source follows the rules that search engines look for. If your site doesn't pass validation, it doesn't mean search engines won't scrape and index your content... it just means it might take longer, be indexed incorrectly, or be indexed incompletely. For example you might have an unclosed tag and will then get indexed in the search engine as whatever the search engine sees fit instead of what you tell it is the title of the web page.

Meta Information:
Use the exact order title, description, keywords when defining your meta data for each page. It sounds silly that the order of these matter but tests have proven that search engines favor this order. Make sure not to have too long of a title or description so that it will be seen exactly as you define in search engines instead of a truncated version with ... at the which cuts off valuable data you want users to see. When building your keywords meta data, stick to four or five strong keywords or keyterms per page. Any more than this start to take strength away from your primary keyterms.

Heading Tags:
Every single web page should have an H1 tag. This is the highest point of your web page and holds the most strength regarding search engines standpoint. If you have a sub-context area use an H2 tag to define it classifying this as the second most important content area. Heading tags define the content of the web page and when read by search engines see it of great importance.

Appropriate Content Tags:
Your content, if it is a paragraph, should go in p tags. This is the real meat of the web page. Search engines could care less if you have images, flash, or other media elements on the page, as long as it has content to garble up, it is happy. Strong tags and Em tags are also advised to define extra emphasis on specific elements within your paragraph. Use them sparingly though or they loose meaning. HTML also contains unordered and ordered lists and which should be used when generating any type of list. These tags (OL and UL) specify a different type of content that should be displayed in a list fashion... so don't fake it out within a Paragraph tag and Breaks (BR).

Table-less Design:
A million articles have been written why you should stick with table-less designs but I am going to focus on the search engine readability reason, filesize. The faster and easier a search engine can scrape your web pages content, the better. Building CSS-based instead of table-based designs not only gives users faster visibility of the page (because tables have to render the entire table before displaying anything), it also makes for smaller and cleaner source code using div's. Div tags can also be abused but for the most part it literally allows search engines to seperate pieces of content into divisions via your source code and makes for much smaller page read filesizes. If you had a 2 meg in total HTML document, chances are that a search engine would choke before being able to download, parse and index that page.

CSS and JavaScript:
Make sure to keep CSS and JavaScript files seperate and linked to instead of using inline CSS and in-page JavaScript. This removes the clutter and allows search engines to snag the content it wants and not have to worry about unnecessary blocks of CSS styles or scripts. For the user's sake, you should also run your CSS and JavaScript through validators to verify their integrity. The last thing you want is for a non-cross-browser compliant page that renders un-readable in some browsers and pops up JavaScript error messages all over the place.

Keyword Saturation:
Its important to keep your content consistent per page. One popular mistake made by many web developers is to saturate your keywords, which means to use the same keyword over and over hundreds of times in a single HTML document. This is seen as "keyword stuffing" by search engines and will treat your web page as a cheater. If you can't seem to find any other words regarding your keyword, use a thesaurus or its possible you are done with the source code. Repetition is not appreciated by search engines and you will get docked for it if abused.