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.

1. Emphasize what your site offers that’s of value to users and how your services differ from those of key competitors
Compliance rate: 27%
One of the very essential issues in homepage but its the least that is being followed among these guidelines.Stating and empasizing your services offered is a very important factor for your targeted customers but instead, they hide what they offer in a so called “ generic marketese” that doesn’t even give much attention to their prospectives customers

2. Use a liquid layout that lets users adjust the homepage size
Compliance rate: 28%
This quidelines is very important too for customers for them to also be comfortable browsing on the site. Since not all of them has the same size of monitor oter may have only small sizes that’s why they need to resize.

3. Use color to distinguish visited and unvisited links
Compliance rate: 33%
Helping your customers and visitors of your site by showing them marks on how to distinguish the visited and unvisited links through colors. These feature could help a lot most especially the elderly users. Sites that are friendly users could benefit much our targeted customers.

4. Use graphics to show real content, not just to decorate your homepage
Compliance rate: 35%
People are naturally drawn to pictures; gratuitous graphics can distract users from critical content. Photos of your your product is the best art for your site to show your customers what they are looking for and to help them visualize and not just imagine what it looks like.

5. Include a tag line that explicitly summarizes what the site or company does
Compliance rate: 36%
Finding your prospected clients for your online business will be very easy if you have a very clear marketing strategy. One that could make them understand what your company is all about or what specific products and services you offer. That’s why a Tag line that recapitulates your sites mission and vision plus your products and services would serve best for your customers and visitors.

6. Make it easy to access anything recently featured on your homepage
Compliance rate: 37%
Your postings, sales, products or services that is recently featured on your site must be accessible for your customers or visitors. So they won’t have a hard time searching for what they need.

7. Include a short site description in the window title
Compliance rate: 39%
This is the main core of your site especially for the visibility on search engine and this would be the best marketing strategy and even less expensive one.

8. Don’t use a heading to label the search area; instead use a “Search” button to the right of the box
Compliance rate: 40%
There’s no reason to label the search box if there’s a “Search” button right next to it. Interaction design’s less is more principle tells us that extra elements in a dialogue distract users from the salient points and reduce their ability to understand an interface.

9. With stock quotes, give the percentage of change, not just the points gained or lost
Compliance rate: 40%
This guideline only applies to sites that provide consumers with the stock quotes. With these, the general perspective, is to help users understand the relative magnitude of a change, and its importance.

10. Don’t include an active link to the homepage on the homepage
Compliance rate: 41%
This applies to all websites or intranet pages: never have a link that points to the current page.
Active links to current pages cause three problems:
* If they click it, a link leading to the current page is an utter waste of users’ time.
* Worse, such links cause users to doubt whether they’re really at the location they think they’re at.
* Worst of all, if users do follow these no-op links they’ll be confused as to their new location, particularly if the page is scrolled back to the top.

Source: Homepage Guidelines