Beginning HTML, XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript®

Chapter 14. Checklists

This final chapter contains checklists on some helpful topics. The checklists are not intended to be exhaustive and turn you into an expert on each of these topics (as there are entire books devoted to the subjects of these checklists). Rather, the purpose is to show the key points, and bring together some of the things you have learned throughout the book. There are four checklists, covering:

• Search engine optimization

• Accessibility

• Differences between HTML and XHTML

• HTML 5

Search Engine Optimization Checklist

On any successful site, a good proportion of traffic will come from search engines. In order for people to find you on a search engine, you want to be as near the top of their search results as possible.

The techniques you can use to improve your visibility in search engines are known as Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short, and can be grouped in two ways:

• Things you can do on the site (on-page)

• Things that appear on other people's sites (off-page)

We will mainly be focusing on the former because you have a lot more control over what appears on the pages of your own site (although mentions will be made of off-page techniques).

On-Page Techniques

Before you can start optimizing your site for search engines, you need to determine what terms users would type into a search engine in order to find your site; these are known as keywords and key phrases.

You then need to include these keywords and phrases in the copy for your site. There are four places where it ...