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Next: X-Linking
Web Authoring ToolsWeb authoring tools can be the bain of an optimizers life. Many people launch into their website, producing lots of nice looking pages but without really understanding how the web and in particular, search engines, work. Professional web designers are not necessarily any better, concentrating on form over function. This is why many search engine optimizers are able to beat big professional websites with multi-million dollar budgets in search engine results pages. The HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the basis of web pages. It is important to remember that people may want to view your content using many different browsers running on different types of machines. HTML is a fairly elegant solution to this problem. The author uses special tags to identify the structure of the page: the Title, different Headings etc and then leaves it up to the user's browser to display or render this as best it can. HTML is not designed to be a WYSIWYG desk top publishing solution.
Unfortunately there are people who don't understand this distinction. They want their pages to display exactly as they see them in their web authoring tool. As a consequence many tool designers cater for this demand. In an effort to produce WYSIWYG pages the tool generates dozens of nested tables with specific dimensions. It may insert fonts and font size information without knowing if these fonts are available to the reader's browser. Worse, it can use hidden images to try and position the various elements. Many authoring tools produce code that will not validate against any of the current standards and some produce errors. Microsoft Visual Studio was known to remove closing tags from HTML elements and this could cause incorrect formatting on some browsers. All this produces a mess of HTML code. Although search engine robots are pretty tolerant about what they will accept the page will be far from optimal with a high code to content ratio. The pages may even be too long to get fully indexed, or it may take a number of passes before all the content and links are explored. The pages are also harder to optimize as the structure will be unclear. The code may also be impossible to load into a different web authoring tool. Some web authors don't do themselves any favours when creating content. They may misuse mark-up elements to create particular formatting effects. They may also use formats which search engines find hard to index such as Flash animations and Javascript driven menus. Javascript menus are a good way of stopping search engine robots dead on your first page. If you do use Javascript elsewhere, perhaps for validating input to forms, move the code to external Javascript (.js) files away from the eyes of search engine robots. Cascading Style SheetsCascading Style Sheets (CSS) were designed to address the demands of web sites for better control over formatting. They enable fonts and font sizes to be customized for any HTML tag and also enable absolute positioning of elements on a page. They can also replace natty animated Javascript menu systems with search engine friendly links and anchor text. The great thing is that all of this information can be contained in one or more external files so that web pages return to their origins: succinct mark-up and content. From the web author's viewpoint the look and feel of the whole site can be altered by changing a single file, from the robots viewpoint the page is smaller and the intent of the mark-up usually clearer. What's more, most web authoring tools can work with style sheets so there is no need to learn a complete new package. Authoring tools can often be configured to only produce code that corresponds to one of the current XHTML or HTML standards. The authoring tool may still leave a number of artefacts in the code such as unnecessary Meta information but this can often be cleaned up later by a Perl script for people who are very picky.
See AlsoCascading Style Sheets <www.w3.org/Style/CSS/> |
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