Design & search engine placement

[sallyoz]

One of the classic rules for good search engine placement is the design of the website itself to reduce the amount of code. ie. avoid javascript at the top of the page, get the text to the top of the page and limit code.

I would like to know anyones advice on how to accomplish this and if anyone knows a resource that addresses this in detail. I utilise linking javascript to an external file to delete all that code but what about other formatting. Should we be using Style Sheets in place of Tables, what should the ratio of code vs real content be.

Any other tips would be great.

Cheers

Sally

[aspen]

style sheets instead of tables won't really make much of a difference as far as your coding size goes. The big things are remotely including CSS and Javascript, and you're already doing that.

[goldrake75]

the structure of your site can increase or decrease its page rank.
there were some studies online, but I don't remember the link..

[pony]

Is there anything to be gained from how a CSS layout orders the text for a spider as opposed to how nested tables order the same text?

[aspen]

Possibly Pony. If you can use CSS to get your important content nearer to the top that can help, but on the flip side having your menu at the bottom of the code could cause it to be cut off if you have a very long page.

Overall this is one of those things that helps, but not enough to really stress over.

goldrake75, if you're talking about Google's PageRank, site structure has nothing to do with it.

[Golgotha]

use heading tags, alt tags, descriptive links...
something that I think not enough people utilize and SEs really like is a sitemap...


hey Aspen, what about comments? Do SEs care about them? I use a program the simulates a spider and it appears to be looking at my comments aswell???

[aspen]

You can't write a program or get a program that simulates a search engine spider, because each one is different and many of their intricacies are closely guarded secrets.

The spider isn't even the thing that ranks your site, the spider just travels the web downloading pages. There is other software that analyzes and ranks the pages.

As far as I know comment tags are not taken into account, and this makes sense since if you take comments into account you might as well count invisible text too.

[Golgotha]

yeah, I would think MOST would not care about comments, but using Bruce Clay's pages analyzer, it shows a stat for your comments. Owell, it's no big deal, it never hurts, so I dropped a few lame keyword comments in there, without spamming

[goldrake75]

goldrake75, if you're talking about Google's PageRank, site structure has nothing to do with it.

aspen, I firmly think site structure has a lot 2 do with PR, and that's not just an opinion.
look @ the google algo: each page gives a score (and increase the PR) to the pages it links;
a well connected structure will increase the PR, cause each page scores internal pages.
also external links will spread the PR to other sites...
there's a bit difference between this structure:

A - - - B - - - C - - - D

and this one

A - B
| \ |
| / \|
C - D

Do u agree?

[aspen]

We're talking about page structure not interconnectedness. Even if you define structure differently in this discussion it has been defined, more or less, as how you format your source code. If you include javascript and CSS remotely, or if you keep it in the page file. If you use CSS or tables, if you put your menu above or below your content. If you come into this conversation and say page structure influences PR you're wrong, because PR doesn't care how your format your source code. We're talking about the structure of a single page, not of an entire website.

[Potnoodle]

kiss and make it better. Great parenting site thanks for the tips. What a pity this type of site seems to be in the background.

Regards

[aspen]

Um thanks... I really only made that site because I liked the domain, I haven't promoted it much or added much content to it yet.