Sight Re-Code for Better Rankings
Thursday, May 26th, 2005You have a great looking website, stimulating content, excellent inbound links, the site has been doing really well and you’ve had the edge on your competitors. Suddenly you find the website slipping down the search engine ladder for no good reason at all. Nothing has really changed with your competitors except for a few minor alterations, what went wrong?
Old Technology: Depreciated Code
A largely overlooked facet of search engine optimisation strategy is the coding of a website. If a site is using old and outdated code it can have a detrimental effect on the overall outlook of a site. The importance of re-coding a website cannot be overlooked. Recently at Southbourne Internet we made the decision to re-design the entire website, the new site will go live sometime in March 2006, in the meantime we opted for a re-coding of the existing site. What prompted us were several issues including a swift drop in our own rankings, wanting to make the website W3C standard compliant.
We could see no reason why we should have dropped considering our content was more up to date than most of our competitors. Somehow we had either ‘tripped a filter’ or just got caught up in the grind of a search engines latest algorithm, it happens to the best of us. We analysed and probed the So-Net website including looking at our back-links, while a medium sized number were all quite good, we had taken no part in any reciprocal linking schemes except for exchange some links with good websites that our clients or visitors would find useful. We knew it couldn’t be that.
Another reason for coding was to make our website more accessible. This should be first on the list for any site owner. After all it makes not only makes for good business ethics to be accessible, by having an inaccessible website you are locking out an important sector of the market.
We re-coded the entire website to XHTML and replaced all tables with dives. We then tweaked the content and images and bought the site to W3C validation including WAI, Level AAA, XHTML, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) compliancy.
Within 48 hours our site started to climb again in the search engines, By dropping the tables we had created a clear path through our content and made life easier for the search engine ‘bots’ and more important our site was cross browser friendly working with the top browsers such as Internet Explorer, Opera, Firefox and Safari this meant it was also working smoothly for screen readers. Call it co-incidence, but we have many good content sites with clean coding taking more and more top positions.
With reaching these standards we now have a site that works perfectly well on mobile Smartphone’s. As Google has recently announced that it will index websites for its new small mobile search engine and only sites that have no tables and are XHTML compliant. These sites have a better chance of ranking high and being viewed by all visitors to the mobile web.
Mobile web design and optimisation is another path we have explored and now making inroads to bring this into our product portfolio.
Like any good technology it progresses and evolves and the web is the perfect example of this. Coding becomes obsolete after a while and what was once well written validated coding can become undone over a period of time with updates to content, constant search engine tweaking and optimisation.
A good search engine optimisation strategy should always include a thorough look at the current coding in a website and make the necessary adjustments to the code or request to redevelop the client’s current website.
SEO is a lot more than pointing a load of links and writing content for the site. The absolute re-working of the content, coding adjustments, image manipulation, meta-data should and does play a strong role in search campaigns. By validating and keeping your code up-to-date, not only gives you an edge with a large margin above your competitors, it’s also lightens your work load later and simplifies the process of any future tweaking to the site.
