Great design doesn’t always mean great code. A website may look great and function properly in a browser. It may even have fabulous content. But what’s “under the hood” can make the difference between a top-ranked site and a low-ranked site. Most people—even site designers—don’t realize that some of the top-end programs used to design and build websites add a lot of extra junk to the code.
The net effect of this code, if allowed to remain in place, is to slow the ability of the search engine to quickly parse through your code and find the good stuff. This may cause the search engine to abandon your site or discourage it from continuing on to other pages that may also contain valuable information.
Junk code and other technical site issues can cause search engines to abandon your website or discourage them from continuing onto other pages.
Some coding elements can even completely prevent the spider from indexing your site at all. Bad navigation menus, framed sites, and improperly closed tags can prevent the search engine from viewing the content of the site as the viewer does. If the search engine cannot see it, your rankings will not accurately reflect the relevance of your pages for your most important search terms.
For the most part, this junk code is just unnecessary extra coding that can be moved to external files, cascading style sheets or removed altogether.
Checklist for Technical Optimization
- Diagnose and fix site speed issues
- Eliminate code bloat
- Create, implement, and validate style sheets (CSS) to streamline coding
- Validate HTML
- Make sure CSS and JavaScript are not hidden from search engines
- Reduce/eliminate HTML tables
- Fix broken links and properly redirect pages that have been removed
- Use HTML-coded links rather than JavaScript or other coding
- Create and submit an XML sitemap to search engines
- Don’t block images and use true HTML to link to each one rather than JavaScript
- Consider renaming pages and enhancing directory structure
- Make sure site is optimized for mobile
- Silo your content and create good internal linking structure
- Eliminate duplicate content
- Review robots.txt file to ensure you’re not blocking pages you want search engines to spider
- Use structured data where possible and appropriate
How Pole Position Marketing Can Help
Not sure how to implement these fixes? Let us handle your technical SEO. We can analyze, edit, and streamline your code for fast and proper search engine indexing.