Twelve Simple Ways To Write Search-Friendly HTML Code
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- Don’t repeat yourself. Use server side includes for headers, footers, menus, and standard <head> items such as links to CSS documents and external JavaScript files.
- Balance tags in server side includes. If an include file starts with <div> it should end with </div>. This way each file can be viewed in Dreamweaver design view, and includes files do not depend on each other.
- Place JavaScript in external files and reference them as needed.
- Each page must have a unique <title> and <meta name=”description” content=”This is a sample.”>. Don’t put these in server side includes.
- The title should be <title>Name of Company – Name of Page</title> or <title>Name of Company – Name of Category – Name of Page</title> unless you are told otherwise.
- The description should be the first one or two meaningful sentences of content unless you are told otherwise.
- Please make all links and references to images, CSS and JavaScript root relative by starting them with a slash, “/”. If you use Dreamweaver, set the “Links relative” option to “Site root” in the Site Definition wizard. Root relative links don’t break when files are moved from one directory to another.
- Too many files in one directory makes things hard to find. Use subdirectories.
- Run your code through a validator and keep it clean. Removing trivial errors makes real errors easier to spot.
- Use CSS with HTML elements like <div>, <span>, <p>, <h1>, and so on, to format things. Only use layout tables when they produce better results or cleaner code than CSS.
- Use heading tags, unordered lists and numbered lists to organize content rather than spacer graphics and nested tables..
- Consistently use the simplest URLs. Link to “/” instead of “/index.php” or “/news/” instead of “/news/index.php”.
