Basic SEO: What Search Engines Hate - More Clutter
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The next trick that helps reduce clutter on your page involves Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). It is basically the same technique we used when we created external JavaScript files, only this time I'm referring to external CSS files. Using these will not only help optimize your site, but it will generally make modifying your website a lot easier. If you want to change the body or heading text in some way, all you have do is make a change to the CSS file and it will automatically affect the whole site. I'm pretty sure this is what CSS was designed for anyway.
Follow these steps to create an external CSS file:
Select the code you want to remove from the HTML (everything between and including <STYLE></STYLE>) and save it in an external text file.
Save this file to your web server.
Use the <LINK> tag to call the file in your HTML. For example,
<link rel=“stylesheet” href=“nameoffile.css” type=“text/css”>
As a rule of thumb, you should never copy text from Microsoft Word and paste it into your page. Doing so will leave tons of format clutter in your HTML code. If you must use Word, you should save the file as an HTML file. Then you can clean up the code with the Word-cleaning tool in your HTML-authoring program. As a last resort, you can also clean it manually using “search and replace” in a text editor (Notepad).
An image map is an image that contains multiple links. If you have these on your page, you should move all code that defines the links to the bottom of the page (right before </BODY>). Obviously, this doesn't actually remove the clutter, but it does prevent it from clogging up the space between the top of your page and the content. This should make it easier for the searchbots to reach all pertinent information.
Next: Dynamic Web Pages >>
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