Website Usability and SEO - Clean Design and Usability
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Clean Design
A clean and uncluttered design is usually a win-win situation for both your visitors and the search engines. The simplest and most cleanly coded websites are usually the ones that are visited and crawled the most, since many people know that they will find what they are looking for and where to find it; they usually are repeat visitors as well. Search engines also like to crawl sites that are not heavy on their resources. Anytime a search engine has to wade through a website in order to find the content, it taxes the search bot’s resources, and may make it spider the site less often.
Cleanly coded and compliant HTML makes for easier development for the next web designer to make changes to content. Being able to find your way around someone else’s code is important to new inductees having to look at a page for the first time. Being able to find their way around makes it easier for proofreading, editing, updating content, and fixing site issues that may prevent spidering or ranking well.
Extra tags - It’s also my belief that the <font> tag will soon be deprecated, with the popularity and more browsers conforming to CSS standards. Other tags like <b> and <i> and others are already being replaced with other tags, but in a text to code ratio analysis, all those HTML tags will affect these ratios considerably. Keeping them to a minimum is in your best interest. For example, instead of a tag for a table cell looking like this:
<td><td width=”350” height=”200”><td align=”center”>
It should be more like this:
<td width=”350” height=”200” align=”center”>
There are many situations where using an HTML editor, like FrontPage, will add in those extra tags if you make changes at a later time, whereas other editors like DreamWeaver will group them together for you. Consolidating these tags are not only more search engine friendly, but it enables you to create cleaner code for easier updating later.
Scripts – I talked earlier about using JavaScript links or links embedded in a Frames layout being difficult for search engines to follow. But also, all that code in the <head> section and throughout the body of your web page can make crawling more resource intensive for a search engine. It may look incredible, but if search engines don’t want to crawl and index the page, it doesn’t help people find your pages. Plus, all that code clutters up your pages. It’s better for you to offload your code to an external file if at all possible, like with JavaScript or CSS styles.
CSS - CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, is a very search engine friendly language, because many times CSS is put into external files, since search engines seem to disregard the CSS styling anyways. There really is no reason to keep CSS styles within the <head> section of your web page when you can easily reference the external style sheet in the page, and keeping your code tidy and your text to code ratios more in tact.
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