Search Engine Musings

I look at dozens of sites every week and one of the first things I do is check the code to see how they’ve been constructed and, amongst other things, whether the code is valid or not. What I see time and again is designers who don’t understand DOCTYPES and cause themselves and their clients problems. A lot of this stems from the defaults used in Dreamweaver and designers over-relying on it to do things for them.

Earlier versions used an HTML version 4 DOCTYPE but crucially ommitted the address, meaning that the pages were in quirks mode on most browsers. That meant lots of cross browser incompatibilities and problems rendering modern CSS properly. It was a well-known problem amongst the better web design forums and newsgroups but many never seen to have picked up on it. It’s easy enough to set up the various correct types as snippets, and it’s even quite easy to change the default in one of the internal template files.

Recent versions of Dreamweaver use an XHTML DOCTYPE by default and amongst the more stringent requirements of this is that you must close any tag that doesn’t naturally have a closing tag. This includes meta tags and image tags and you must add a trailing / before the closing > in order to be writing valid code. A good designer really should be aware of this but unfortunately a great many aren’t and this results in a lot of sites with a lot of validation errors. Some search engines are more forgiving of validation errors than others but why make it harder for them? All my experience says that cleaning up the code helps rankings; and of course valid code is the only real foundation for maintaining cross-browser compatibility and future-proofing your site.

Incidentally, Dreamweaver is a good product and certainly the best of the visually capable web editors, but like any program it has to be used with knowledge and understanding of the language it’s creating. It generally produces decent code but if you push it in the wrong directions or use it inappropriately then it can produce rubbish just like any other program.

Learn about the different DOCTYPES and the reason for using them at the Web Design Group site, and the W3C Recommended list of DTDs, and make your web designs a lot more professional and your sites a lot more search engine friendly.

It’s amazing how often you need to step back and reassess aspects of the search engine optimisation industry. Sometimes you catch yourself trotting out a piece of advice or information that you’ve been giving for ages and you suddenly realise that the last few projects have shown that those general guidelines have changed.

For one thing I really must stop talking about MSN - it’s been Live Search for months now and the search algorithm appears to be entirely different from the old MSN one if the results I see are anything to go by.

Fast Google results?

A good example of the changes that creep up on you is how easy and in what order you can get improved search results in the big three engines. We used to regularly tell potential clients that for a new site you could get MSN Live Search and Yahoo results in a couple of months but Google would seldom produce anything useful for about six months due to ageing filters. Now it seems things have moved. A new jewellery design site I built from scratch has seen some excellent results inside three months from the initial files going live and from this and others I’m working on I’m increasingly convinced that if you get the structure and content right from the start you can get Google to pay attention much more readily than was previously the case.

That’s the key though - building the site correctly, and having everything in place - no spider stoppers, good structure, good navigation, and good content well formatted. This shows how important it is to involve an SEO expert at the earliest stages, preferably before the design is finalised. It makes it a lot harder if the site is already built with structural problems in any of these areas; even if the SEO gets to it quite quickly and rectifies matters it may already have got off on the wrong foot with the search engines and that may set you back a few months.

And what about links I hear the old hands asking? Well my experience is that a small number of trusted and relevant links are far more useful than large numbers of lesser ones to set a new site on the right track. Of course in a highly competitive market where your main rivals have massive numbers of backlinks you’ll need more, but quality wins over quantity every time, and by that I don’t mean PageRank either! And that’s something else that’s changed a lot - though you wouldn’t think so by the way some of the link requests that come in are worded.

Must go and do a search-and-replace on MSN in my reports…