8 Steps to a Successful SEO Campaign: XHTML & CSS

Site Design

First impressions can be important. How your site looks and reacts can be the difference between users taking the time to browse through and users who land on a page and immediately click away. We’ve all been a part of this experience. The site is either too difficult to navigate, takes too long to load, or is just plain ugly. All of these experiences are definitely not the first impressions you want to give to someone viewing your site for the first time (or at any time, for that matter). Therefore, we can pinpoint whether we’re going to have a pleasant experience on a website by its visual appeal, loading time, and the information being easy to reach.

These requirements — coupled with good design — can be achieved through modern coding techniques, like using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) instead of a table-based layout. CSS allows you to separate the style from the code. Doing this provides numerous benefits:

• Decreased amount of code
• Accessibility to users
• Semantically oriented content for the search engine bots
• Easier updating of style and content
• More cross browser compatibility

Visual Appeal

Creating a visually appealing website should be at least one of your objectives if you’re designing a website from scratch. Completely underwhelming your user base with a less than adequate design is detrimental to your online presence. A good designer should be more than capable of designing a fully functional, standards-based, compliant website without using tabled-based layouts. Andy Clarke, in his book Transcending CSS, states that:

It is now an essential part of a professional web designer’s job to understand the fundamentals of meaningful markup and CSS.

However, there are instances where a design which is too intricate can hinder the website. The design may be so distracting that the user gets caught up in the layout, rather than the content. For instance, if your site leans heavily on providing information, that’s what the user should get. Information is still information, regardless of how it is dressed up. However, a photography or design site is a good example where an intricate design may prove useful because you’re accentuating the content on the site, not distracting from it.

Site Structure

Good HTML structure should have a natural flow. This means that there should be a logic, an order and a use of semantically oriented markup. A heading should use the header element, a paragraph should use a paragraph element, a list should use the unordered/ordered list elements and so on. But why is this important to SEO? Quite simply, because it helps search engine better understand your content, and therefore improve your SERPs.

A website designed with tables has a completely different structure than a site built with CSS (remember that tables were meant for displaying tabular data, not for a complete layout). Imagine different blocks of information spread out over a large area; then imagine that same information in one single piece that has an order and a natural flow to it. When a search engine bot crawls a website built with tables, it is crawling each table individually, searching for the information. How much simpler for a website to have a structure that contains easy-to-access information for both the search engine and the user!

Content

Arguably the single most important factor in on-site SEO is content. Content on the website should be written and optimized for both users and search engines. Regularly updated, original content will appeal to both users and hungry search engine bots looking for new, original content. Content that is frequently updated and is high quality will always do well in attracting repeat visitors and improving SERPs.