Immediate SEO Benefits of Using Structural Markup and CSS

• The combination of standards-based HTML and CSS generally result in much smaller HTML files so web pages load more quickly.
• The structured code will also improve the search engines ability to effectively index web page content. Search Engine mechanisms realize proper document structure.
• CSS-styled HTML elements used in place of images, particularly for page headers, will enable you to strategically use your keywords where they count the most.

Document Type (DOCTYPE)

The DOCTYPE is essential to the proper rendering and functioning of web documents in compliant browsers like Mozilla, IE5/Mac, and IE6/IE7. A recent DOCTYPE that includes a full URI tells these browsers to render your page in standards-compliant mode, treating your HTML and CSS you expect them to be treated.

META Information

The <title> tag – The most important location for your targeted keywords/key phrases is the <title> tag, preferably at the beginning of the tag. Since the maximum allowed <title> tag display length varies between major search engines, be sure your title is no longer than 65 characters. This is effective because search engine spiders use the <title> as the primary source for determining the web page topic (Figure 1). This text is also displayed as the linked “title” in the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs).

Meta Description – Add a META description tag to the HTML source using your keywords to describe the landing pages contents (Figure 1). The META description needs to be unique for each page and should never be the same as the HTML <title> tag. Also, like the <title> tag, various search engines may have different text length limits. Sometimes search engines list the description below the “title” in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Figure 1

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Content, Links, and Page Naming

CSS Styled text headers – Place your keywords (figure 2) in CSS-styled text headers (<h1>, <h2>, etc.). It is very important CSS-styled headers are used rather than image headers or headers created using non-standard HTML markup unless you use one of the methods described here. Well structured, standard HTML markup always has the upper hand to non-standard HTML. More importantly, search engines index text, not images.

Figure 2

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Links and Navigation – Web pages anchor text and structure is another important aspect of SEO. The first one is for the web site visitor. The second reason is that many of the search engines not only give the linking anchor text a lot of weight, but good navigation helps their indexing robots. If the robots get stuck or have no links to follow through, they will stop indexing.

Consider the following example: < href=”about.html” title=”About us”>About The Company<a>

This is a basic link but nothing in this link is relevant to the actual company or type of company it is. If a human were to examine this link there would be a number of unknowns such as; “about whom?” “Who are “us””? “What company?” The same applies to Search Engines therefore search rank would drop and nothing relevant would be indexed.

Consider the following proper link example: <a href=”/used_cars/about_used_cars/” title=”About Used Cars”>About Used Cars</a>

Note that the link text, as well as the sub-directory (if exists), link title, and page name it is linking to, have the keyword/key phrase. This will help our SEO greatly. If a human were to examine this link they would realize that this link is about “used cars”. The same applies for Search Engines. To search engines, this would be flagged as an important page and would index the key terms used and immediately start to gain positioning for that key phrase. If you search anything on Google, you will notice that search terms are highlighted as well as the key terms stripped from the URL’s body content.

Internal Links – Google and other Search Engines treat each webpage as a single page. Not as a part of a web site, so when it comes to linking to your own pages it’s very important that good care is considered when you optimize your keyword linking methods, as described in (Figure 3). Make use of the footer by linking to all of your most important pages (especially the site map) and using appropriate anchor.

Content Quality & Content Quantity - Keywords should always appear in the content of the web site, ideally in the first paragraph. Keep a good link structure in your paragraphs. Consider Figure 3 for example:

Figure 3

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Note that the text link is now embedded inside a readable paragraph but does not take place of the other keywords in the paragraph text. Search Engines like this. This example tells me that the paragraph is talking about “Discount Used Cars” prices and linking to them. The “Used Cars” and “Discount Used Cars” is used quite a bit in this single paragraph without being obtrusive. Search Engines will instantly pick this up as a keyword and your visitors can navigate and follow links easier as well.

Content Quantity is also very important. People search for a huge variety of words in all sorts of combinations. The more text and keywords you have, the more chance that some particular phrase will match the exact phrase someone is search for. Some search engines also place importance on quantity. They assume that a large web site has had more effort put into development and is more likely to be high quality.

Summary

There are, of course, many more considerations, which set the stage for successful SEO campaigns – but fundamentally improving code by using a standards-based approach, and maintaining this development process is one of the most important steps to improve the success of our Search Engine Optimization strategy, over the long term.