Building A Search Engine Ready Site: What’s In Your Head?

It’s taken me a week longer than anticipated, but here is part 1 of my 4 part series on building a search engine ready site. Not search engine friendly. Search engine ready. What’s the difference? Well, this is my opinion so don’t get hung up on it.. but.. creating a site that has clean semantic coding and a strong emphasis on placing a greater amount of content versus code is to me, making a site search engine ready. How so? When we make a site we already know that content & links are the driving factors to traffic and ranking success. But if our code is an issue for the search engines, then we haven’t done anyone any favors at all. Clean minimal code, plenty of good content. That’s how we roll mofo.

The only thing that should ever be considered “friendly” is presentation and experience for visitors. Make sense? Friendly instills trust and confidence, and trust & confidence reinforce each other, leading to a higher probability of conversions. OK enough about this, let’s dive into the real topic today.

Getting Inside Your Head

View this section of your site in an ordered fashion. Being that visitors will never even care about this part of your site, it’s all about making things easier for the search engine spiders. And this is most definitely where you focus on content for those spiders before humans. I have highlighted the minimal tags you could have by bolding them. Here’s the layout I use, in this order;

1. DOCTYPE declaration
2. Opening html tag (these vary depending upon DOCTYPE)
   
3. Opening head tag
4. Title tag
5. META description tag
6. META keywords tag (if you choose to use them)
7. META robots tag
8. META language tag
9. META http-equiv tag
10. link rel = css stylesheet (if your site contains CSS)
11. link rel = icon (if you have one)
12. link rel = rss feed (if you have one)
13. Closing head tag

Yikes! That’s 12 tags that could go into the head section alone! I know, I know but hear me out on this one. These are the tags that actually mean something to the search engines and to your visitors as well. There’s a mess-load more tags that can go in the head, but frankly they’re rubbish for the most part. The only other ones that have any real use are;

• anything related to when the page expires
• telling the spiders to use the meta description instead of the DMOZ description about your site
• don’t include in the Yahoo directory
• don’t index this page
• some sort of search engine acceptable redirect for that page

The Benefits To Order

In my experience, having your code laid out in a logical fashion works wonders for time management and work-flow when you need to do an edit on the fly. For example, I know that in my head area of every page I work on, I have placed my tags in order of importance.

1. Strictly search engine food (items 1-7)
2. Search engine food & browser agent food (items 8 & 9)
3. Strictly browser agent food (items 10-12)

To be nice to the spiders, we give them what they want first; relevant, keyword rich info right from the start. Placing the title tag, followed by the META description tag is a pretty good way to get your keywords up front and center. Don’t let anything come before these 2 when you open up your head tag.

You might have also noticed that all my tags starting with “META” and “rel” are clumped together. It just sorta happened that way when I was looking reorganize the structure but it’s proven to be a solid way to keep things nice and neat as well as a great way to get my keyword prominence up.

Why This Matters

If you’re unfamiliar with what and why HTML validation is the way to go, then I strongly suggest you start brushing up on the fundamentals of it. The web is a messy place; we got people that have no business making websites with no concept of web standards, subjecting the search engines and “validation freaks” like myself to their twisted and sadistic garbage. I just might have to call my congressman about this someday.

Web Standards are definitely the way of the future for all people making and viewing websites. And the head section is where you begin defining what standards your site observes. If you can nail down the head section (I know you can), validating the rest of the site is a bit easier compared to a broken head and a broken content area.

What’s Next?

That’s it for this part 1 of the series. Here’s what’s next;

Part 2: Navigation Beyond The Menu

Part 3: Hot Spots vs. Dead Spots

Part 4: Final Exam

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