Clean Code
Well, it’s spring time (supposedly). I can’t express how happy I am going to be when it is warm here in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. To be honest, I can’t wait until there is just no more snow and a hint of green. We’ve had an incredible winter of snow, which has been great, but I am ready for it to be gone and for the kayaking and tubing to begin.
Back on track, I had to get that out… I wanted to touch on the importance of good clean HTML and XHTML coding. Michelle Lambert touched on this in her last blog entry, since she has been seeing some good improvements in search engine rankings by doing a little house cleaning on her site.
I often get criticized among my web friends for “focusing too much on HTML code, and for thinking that coding is more important than it is”. And as a web developer who is utterly fascinated with code, I agree with them. However, all things being equal, I maintain that cleaning the code of your website is the most important aspect to search engine optimization. There, I said it. And here is my brief explanation of why I think that:
All things being equal, the site with the better coding will rank better. Of course, all things are not equal. Your competitors could be paying more for pay-per-click ads, or have better incoming links to their site, which would give them an edge in the rankings. However, you can always pay more for advertising, or solicit better links to your site. Your code, on the other hand, is something that is generally handled only by a web developer or even your shopping cart software. And here is where the edge comes in; Most web developers do NOT know how to create search engine friendly websites. Sad, but true.
This post is filed under Developers' Corner and has the following keyword tags: search engine optimization, html, xhtml.
