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SEO Through Well Built Pages
By Mark Daoust

Search engines have moved beyond simply calculating keyword
density and link relevance. More and more, the major search
engines are mastering the ability to identify natural human
language and evaluate a web page based on natural human
language. AskJeeves.com was the first search engine to attempt
to move to a natural human language system, although they
focused on the user input aspect of search rather than
evaluating the natural language of a web page itself.

By learning to identify natural human language, search engines
are able to greatly reduce the amount of search engine spam.
Search engine advances continue, especially on the heels of
Google's suspected algorithm change (http://publications.mediapost.com/
index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticleHomePage&art_aid=27415)
which will enable Google to weigh the relevance of links against
the content of their pages. Search engines will continue to look
at the entire content of websites and continue to attempt to
identify the real subjects and themes of any given site.

As search engines learn to better identify the natural language
structure of websites, sites that are well formed will have a
natural advantage. Although good search engine rankings will
always depend on more than just the structure and content of a
website, the content of a website will always be the heart of a
page's rankings.

Make a Search Engine's Job Easy

Search engine spiders have a lot of work to do. Not only do they
spider billions of pages every month attempting to discover new
web pages and update already discovered web pages, these spiders
need to parse through hundreds or even thousands of lines of
code trying to distinguish between titles, content, structural
code, and even the occasional keyword stuffing by search engine
spammers. By simplifying your website, you make the job easier
for the spider and allow the spider to index more pages on your
site in a shorter amount of time.

Avoid Bloated Code

Unfortunately for the sake of design, many website owners have
paid absolutely no attention to how efficient their code is. As
a result, they may have a lot of extraneous, unnecessary code.
The result of bloated code is a page that may be difficult and
confusing for a search engine to decipher, or the spider may
misinterpret the code.

Fortunately, HTML and CSS is quickly catching up to the design
standards of website professionals. Using proper HTML and CSS,
you can design extremely appealing websites that do not rely on
tables for their layout. If you would like to see just how
versatile and effective HTML and CSS is, look at the examples
laid out at CSS Zen Garden. CSS Zen Garden
(http://www.csszengarden.com/)is a website that displays the
power of CSS and properly formed HTML. There are several
different designs all using the exact same HTML, but through
CSS they are able to build sites that look completely different
from each other.

If you want to see something very amazing about what CSS Zen
Garden  is doing, follow these steps. View the HTML of their
page. It does not matter what style you are viewing, the HTML is
the same for every style. Now copy that code and paste it into
your HTML editor and view the output. The page that you will see
is an extremely basic looking page. More importantly, though,
the page that you will see is a very well organized page which
would be easy for any spider to understand.

Learn More About HTML

If you are like most website owners, you know very little about
HTML. You may know a little bit of code here and there, but it
really does not seem worth your time to learn the inner workings
of HTML. If you feel this way, then you are really missing out
on great SEO opportunities.

HTML is built to naturally identify parts of your web page that
are more important than others. It was built to be extremely
organized. Using the organization that HTML provides, you can
help a search engine spider identify the parts of your website
that are more important. Below are some uncommon tags that HTML
provides that you can use to help organize your content:

Alt Tag – Most website owners know about this, but including an
Alt Tag on your images is actually required if you want to have
a properly formed website.

 - The acronym tag allows for a website to explain what
an acronym stands for. For example, the acronym SEO stands for
Search Engine Optimization. However, when the spider comes to
your website, all it will see is SEO which may mean various
things. The acronym tag will allow you to add this keyword to
your text. The use of this tag should look like this: seo

 - Although using tables to determine the layout of
your website is becoming a practice that will soon be extinct,
tables will still be necessary. The caption tag allows you to
identify what a specific table is about. An example:
Table 3.2. Raw Sales Data

 - If you ever want to display programming code on your
site, you should use the code tag which will set that text off
as being programming code. Example: 

The H Tags – H1 tags became popular in SEO circles once
website owners learned that Google did pay attention to this
tag. However, there are actually 6 different heading tags. The
H1 tag is the most important while the H6 tag is the least
important. If a search engine were to try to create a table of
contents from a website, it should be able to do so from the H
tags.

These are just a few examples, but HTML provides several tags
for your content to help you organize your material, and help
search engines know what to emphasize in your content.

Article Tip: We have started a thread of these HTML tags. If you
know of any tags that we have not mentioned here, please add to
the list. You can find the post here.
(http://forums.site-reference.com/t378/s.html)

The lesson from this should be that learning HTML is not an
endeavor that has few benefits. There is a lot of HTML that can
help you both simplify your code and add more content to help
your rankings.

Consider Moving to a Table-less Layout

The demands of web surfers unfortunately increased faster than
website technology could keep up. As a few website owners were
able to present visually appealing websites through tabled
layouts, web surfers quickly became used to the graphic rich and
well organized content. Unfortunately with tabled layouts, HTML
code became sloppy and full of information that dealt only with
the layout of the site, not with the content.

Fortunately, web technology is catching up. It appears as if
Internet Explorer 7, which was announced to be released this
summer (http://tech.velozie.com/news/852), will finally adhere
to the CSS2 standards. If you are not familiar with CSS, just
read that previous sentence as being a very good thing. As was
demonstrated by the example of CSSZenGarden.com, CSS can be used
to create a page that is as appealing, if not more appealing,
than standard tables.

Most website owners know CSS to be a tool that they can use to
edit the appearance of text and the colors of their site, but
CSS is also a tool that can be used for the layout of your site.
As CSS comes out with newer versions (CSS3 is in the works -
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/current-work), layout will become
a more important development.

So how do you move to a table-less layout? The answer is simple:
learn HTML and CSS.

The Side Benefit: Accessibility

Did you know that blind people surf the Internet? That may not
seem shocking initially, but consider that the Internet is a
highly visual medium of transferring information. Blind people
are able to use web readers and Braille machines that interpret
HTML code.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of websites are not accessible
for blind people because they are not well formed sites. By
moving to a well formed website, you will be adding access for
an audience who marketers really do not focus on.

Article Tip Search engines love websites that adhere to W3C's
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
(http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/)

Bringing it Back to SEO

Many website owners are reluctant to take the time, energy, and
money to really learn HTML and CSS, or to learn how they can
make their websites truly accessible. However, in the end, they
could be hurting their search engine rankings once search
engines move closer to identifying natural human language.

The creators of HTML have done a magnificent job in creating a
structure that can be used to organize your content in ways that
make search engine optimization extremely easy. As the owner of
your website, you should take care to make sure that it is
running the way it was intended to. You would never purchase a
car that fails to meet basic standards of quality, so why would
you trust your company's income to a website that is based on
code that does not meet the quality standards of the Internet?

Designing your site properly does take time and effort, but the
rewards are numerous. Not only will you have the satisfaction of
having a website that is both light in its code and efficient,
but search engines will be able to identify the key points of
your content much easier, thus giving you more control of your
rankings.

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Mark Daoust is the owner of http://www.site-reference.com. This
article originally appeared at http://www.site-reference.com/
Search-Engines/5377/index.html
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