Why Clean Website Code is Key For SEO Friendly Web Design

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There are quite a few webmasters who believe SEO only applies to the things you do after a website has been created. This could mean optimizing various on-page items to maximize the potential for a site to be ranked for a specific keyword or the process of acquiring backlinks from qualified sources to power effective off-page SEO.

Related Tool: On-page seo checker

If you ignore the role the coding on a website plays in terms of optimization, it is essentially the same thing as constructing your home on a foundation that is unstable. Top web design companies always consider the follow five coding elements, which highlight why proper coding can help, or hurt, an entire website’s SEO and what you can do to avoid missing out on these important benefits.

Code Validation Ensures Spider Accessibility

The search engine spider programs have quite a few significant limitations in regard to crawling and indexing websites. Since they are only able to read text, the other elements on the site, which include script files, video, audio and image can prevent the text from being crawled and properly indexed.

Helpful Tip: There are a number of tools you can use, such as the Search Engine Spider Simulator that allows you to see how your website is viewed by the crawlers. If you see that there are missing chunks of text from your pages, you should ensure your code is validated so search engines can easily find your information.

Create SEF URL Rewrites by Coding

Creating a search engine friendly SEF URL is beneficial for user experience, as well as for SEO. The way to modify a websites code to reduce the number of extra characters and codes that are present in the URL will be based on the platform your site is running on. For example, if you use Joomla, WordPress or other CMSs, you should have a number of plugins on your dashboard that will help you make the required changes.

Improve Site Speed with Clean Code

While the code for your site may begin clean, as time passes, and the more modifications you make, a number of errors can occur, which can slow down the website’s operation. This is why it is essential to do regular checks that account for the following:

Elimination of any whitespace, while maintaining readable code Utilize HTML validators to get rid of unpaired or broken tags Use broken link checker tools to get rid of URLs that are no longer valid

Reduce Load Times by Combining Script Files

A fairly new factor that accounts for a site’s ranking is how fast the pages load. This is because of Google’s desire to reward sites that make efforts for short load times. If you have used various scripts to provide more functionality for visitors, these codes, loaded simultaneously, can cause the site’s performance to be restricted significantly. When individual code sheets are compressed or combined into a smaller number of files, you can reduce the longer load times that are the result of excess script demands.

Issues with your website’s code can result in reduced ranking in search engines and have an adverse effect on SEO. Take the time to ensure your code is lean and clean to optimize your ranking.