Search Engine Optimization All-in-One For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Chapter 4

Making Your Page Search Engine Compatible

In This Chapter

• Conquering HTML constructs
• Using clean code
• Designing with sIFR
• Externalizing code
• Validating HTML with W3C
• Choosing the right navigation

In this chapter, you get down to the nitty-gritty stuff that makes your page stand on its own. In addition to worrying about links or content, you have to get the nuts and bolts right. Your SEO strategy is only as strong as its weakest link, so make sure that every part of the chain is forged as tough as you can make it. Paying attention to the small stuff pays off big-time in the long run.

Success with on-page optimization, the changing of the underlying code of a web page for SEO reasons, isn't something that you can just guess at or just hope that you luck out. You need to understand every element of a web page and use it to its fullest potential. Knowing how spiders are going to see and react to your page is absolutely critical to your optimization efforts. For example mistakes with JavaScript can lead to a spider trap, where a spider gets caught in an endless loop and is forced to abandon the page because it has no other alternative. In this chapter, we cover the things that make your page search engine friendly and what the biggest pitfalls are. Getting these elements right is essential if you're going to obtain and retain traffic and rankings in the long term.

In this chapter, we show you how to create clean, attractive HTML pages that properly render in the browser ...