Other than the site content and link quality, search engine crawlers also look into the HTML of a site. When it comes to the structure, the engines like the sites search-friendly. Now most of us don’t really like dealing with HTML. But it will help improve the development of your site. It certainly can’t hurt to learn at least the basic HTML guidelines for SEO. With this, there are certain things to be done and certain things to avoid.

1. Look over your page and check that at it a well-formed HTML or XHTML page. By well-formed, we mean that it meets the W3C standards. You can use the W3C validator tool or the SEO Worker validator for this.

2. Control the size of your page, not too small nor to big (not less than 5K nor more than 15K).

3. Check the page loading time of each page. Make sure that important ones (if not all) load fast. Restrict the loading time to a maximum of 8 seconds.

4. Don’t stuff a page with several links. Keep it to less than a hundred.

5. Keywords are still key. Use your keyword or keyword phrase in the site navigation structure.

6. Don’t forget the title tag! It’s one of the most important SEO techniques. Your title tag for each page should be composed of the strongest keyword or keyword phrase that best describes the page. As much as possible, choose keywords or phrases that should be a part of the page title.

7. Meta tags are also important for better SEO. The Author Meta Tag can help in getting your name or the name of your company in the top spot of search results.

The Description Meta Tag is used to describe the page; it doesn’t really do much to improve the page ranking.

The Keywords Meta Tag can help the search engines in organizing the page and site so that a visitor can easily find it. There are search engines that put a limit to the number of keywords that meta tags allow, so the use of quality keywords or keyword phrases is encouraged.

Robots Meta Tags is used to indicate to the robots visiting the page if it can be indexed. Not all robots follow this anymore though.

8. The heading tag also contributes to better SEO when relevant keywords or keyword phrases are used. As much as possible, keep the usage of the h1 tag to one per page.

9. In using ALT tags, it better not to use it too much because your site could drop from the search results. This tag is better used when linking to an image.

10. In using images, be careful to add the keyword or keyword phrase as part of the image filename. If this is not possible, then put the keywords outside the images or within the ALT tags.

11. Use keywords or keyword phrases as anchor text when linking, especially when linking your page internally.

12. Links that are related to your page or site are rated higher by the search engines. So choose only relevant links to have a positive impact on the search engines.

13. Adding bookmarking icons on your page can help with generating traffic on your page or site. Users and visitors will be able to bookmark your pages and spread word across the Web because of these icons.

14. Selected keywords or keyword phrases should be used throughout the page. It specifically should be in the first few sentences and in the last one, in the title tag, in the heading tag, and once in bold text.

15. It is better to have your links and primary content near or at the center of the page, as this will be more relevant than having them at the corner of the page.

There are many more pointers for HTML guidelines that can help with SEO. For more information and more tips, go to SEO/SEM Journal.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 9:07 am and is filed under Search Engine Optimization, SEO Title Tags, Link Building, Keywords, Home Page Guidelines, Tags, Meta Tags, Website Structure, HTML. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.