Hi all, I'm wondering what the best coding techniques are for SEO? What coding has advantages over others for google rankings? Other than html, what other types of coding can be used? How can I tell what type of coding a page or website is using. For example, what coding are these pages using: retailmenot.com/view/bestbuy.com ecoupons.com/coupon-code/Apple-Store couponcabin.com/coupons/1-800-flowers Thanks
It does not matter if you use .html or .php as Google views the page exactly the same. PHP is the server side which produces a .html page. As amerigohosting says just make sure whatever you go with that the output page produced is readable to your users and to the search engine spiders. CSS is simply a way of keeping styling code off the main page.
The language or technologies you use to code a web site typically has no effect really on SEO since all of the server side languages like PhP, ASP, .NET, Perl, etc. are used to generate HTML server side which is then returned to the browser (and crawlers). I say typically because there ARE a couple of exceptions... Flash: Flash is a TERRIBLE technology for coding web sites in if you care at all about ranking. If you don't want to be found in the search engines then feel free to build a site in pure flash. But if you care anything about ranking because of your content then you want an HTML site. A site written in Flash can only be made to rank with inbound links and link text. The content of the flash is irrelevant for several reasons from an SEO perspective... It is almost as difficult to get to rank as a site made of a bunch of blank pages. Even though Adobe has told Google, Yahoo!, and others how to read their binaries... it still presents problems for search engines and likely will for the next decade or more. One BIG problem is that if an entire site is written as a Flash site then the entire site gets indexed under a single URL. This is terrible from an SEO perspective. It's much easier to make a single URL rank for a keyword phrase if the page is focused on one topic. If you want to rank for multiple keywords then typically you would create multiple pages - one focused on each keyword phrase or topic. You cannot do this with a Flash site. It is next to impossible to make a single URL rank well for many unrelated keyword phrases or topics. By essentially combining them into a single page, it loses focus. Imagine if about.com were a Flash site with all of their unrelated content under one URL. They would not rank for anything. I know this is extreme, but the same applies on a smaller scale for a 15 or 20 page site that might be written in Flash. I have heard Matt Cutts say in person that an HTML page/site with the exact same content and navigation structure as a Flash page/site will ALWAYS outrank the Flash and that it will probably at least another decade before the engines are even reasonably good at indexing and ranking Flash. They've been indexing HTML for more than 10 years. The engines are build around it. All of their tools are build around it. Their ranking algorithms are built around it. While they've been indexing Flash for a while with crude homegrown solutions for interrogating the Flash binaries looking for text, Google and others will need to drastically change their index database structure, utilities, ranking algorithms, etc. before Flash will be viable as an SEO friendly technology. And that ain't gonna happen overnight. Frames: Another TERRIBLE coding technique for SEO is the use of Frames and iFrames. They present all sorts of problems, none of which have good solutions. Even if you get the body of a framed page to rank, when a user clicks on the link at Google, they are taken to the framed body of the page without the navigation because the navigation was not part of that frame. It's in another frame and considered a different page or URL. Since each frame that makes up the virtual 'page' is actually treated as separate pages from a search engine perspective, the body frame doesn't get credit for all of the text and links in the navigation frame, again making it harder to rank. Client-side technologies like AJAX can present SEO challenges as well if not used correctly. But so can server side technologies.
actually seo crawler had no prob with coding but they require simple navigation path which shouldn't have error
Thanks a lot for the responses everyone. Is there any way of telling what the server side coding is of a webpage? For example, the ones I posted on the original post? Thanks
Yea... by guessing and poking around.. I usually try all of the standard default document types for the home page like index.html index.htm index.php index.asp index.aspx default.php default.html default.htm default.asp default.aspx etc. and see which one renders their home page... although some sites will have redirects in place for all of the common ones to their canonical home page URL. Also you can just hover over the links on their page, especially the navigation links and footer links... and usually one of them will expose a file extension that will tell you what they are using. http://community.retailmenot.com/signup.php (several PHP links) http://www.ecoupons.com/referafriend.php?action=www (several PHP links) http://www.couponcabin.com/coupons/coupons.htm (all of their links are .htm so probably an IIS/HTML site)
The original question is too broad. The word 'coding' is used so loosely - You can answer that a million different ways. Give us a more specific question.
coding is not to major an issue as such. Always ensure that you try to keep coding clean but the problem is many designers overseas do not work with html and css validation
thanks a lot for the replies. Is this the validator URL you guys are referring to: http://validator.w3.org If so, google, yahoo, ask, etc all fail this test???
This is a very useful page, the Google Webmaster Guidelines: google.co.uk/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en-uk&answer=35769 As long as your pages comply with what Google are outlining there you will be fine Personally I have found that Google loves Wordpress blogs, which can be designed for in such a way that they don't look like a blog at all. If i'm hardcoding a site it's done in HTML and CSS, always with great SEO results.