Hey guys, I was just wondering if some of you xhtml/css coders out there could help me out. I have always wondered what it meant to "code while seo optimizing" What do you do different in order to make the pages you code seo optimized? It's something that has been bothering me for a while now, so if someone could tell me, I'd greatly appreciate it. Regards, Nick
You really want to talk to Dan Schulz about this one, as he's learned a lot about SEO while building his own (small niche) search engine. There is tons of bullsht out there. Dan's got a thread/post about it, maybe it's stickied in the SEO forum here at DP. Basically, if you code semantically, follow the recommendations of W3C (usually), and keep accessibility in mind, you'll be good with SEO. It's really simple stuff like, if the LOGO image holds the text with the company name, neither the blind, people surfing with images off, NOR googliebots will be able to read it. Holding your menu in Flash or making menu dropdowns in Javascript? You'd better have a normal (x)HTML backup for those same people above-- bots will crawl through menus, and you WANT them to to find the rest of your page even if they don't index the whole page, but they can't navigate through Flash (it's just a file to them) nor javascript (this may change soon as spambots are learning some Javascript to get past defences). Mostly stuff like that. If your site is completely usable and readable in Lynx or some other text browser, the googlies can see all that too and index it. The end.
Cool, thank you very much. Surprisingly enough, I've been doing all the stuff you've mentioned, so I think I am in the clear. I found one of his threads, and I'm just getting ready to read up on it. Thanks a bunch, Nick
A lot of it is the above but it is also some more straight forward things like what text to put in the alt attribute to images, use of header tags, url rewriting etc.... it may or may not include optimisation of the copy for the site too but this varies between providers.