Good Source Code

Why Good Source Code is necessary to gain good search engine ranking

Google, MSN and Yahoo use a variety of bots - spiders and crawlers. These bots crawl through websites using links to access all the information they require. This information is then used to rank sites for different search terms used by potential customers.

In order for these bots to crawl through your website it is important to allow them to move easily and uninhibited. 

Your website must be search engine friendly if you want any traffic from search engines. If search engine crawlers can not crawl your website you will not be ranked.

Search engine robots and crwalers read the web page source code (HTML) and do not see a website how we do. Therefore it is imperitive that this source code is clean and easily read. Bad source code can cause crawlers to give up.

Search engine spiders love text content, but do not read JavaScript or images at all. Therefore a website packed with images without alt tags to assist the spiders, and heaps of JavaScript may not be indexed successfully.

So, when designing your website, it is very important to incorporate structural website design principals to aid search engine crwalers.

In order to see how search engines would see your site use a Lynx Viewer, which is a text mode web browser. 

Website Deisgn

When designing your website you must keep your visitors in mind, however, it is crucial that search engines are your priority too. Without being indexed by the search engines there is a good chance that visitors will not find you, as often these vistors will arrive via a search engine. 

Search engine optimization is quite a balancing act, your site needs to be indexed by search engine bots and crawlers in order for you to gain a good ranking and be found by visitors searching for your information or products. However, your site also needs to appeal to visitors so that  they look at your site and become customers.

Tips for clean code

Never use a word processor to design your website - word processing software generates a tremendous amount of code that is not search engine friendly.

Use a Lynx Viewer to see how search engines would see your code.

The use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and valid XHTML is a good design strategy.

Remember

If your website is not designed with clean code and easy for spiders and robots to crawl, then Google and other search engines may not index your website and therefore the traffic that your site receives will be less and so will your profit.

Search engines are your most important visitors so design well to accommodate them.

Search engines love text. It is important to include focused text content, using rich keywords in your information.

Search engines robots and spiders do not read JavaScript or images without alt tags.

More information on search engines