Website Optimization through Good Code

To understand why good code is important, you need to understand how it gets used. The easiest way to check the code on a site is to fire up your browser and enter the URL. If it looks good in the browser you are all set, right? Wrong. Chances are that you use one browser to verify that the site works, but what about a different browser? Does it look equally good in IE and Firefox? And here is where many fall out... Turn off images and javascript in your browser... this is what the search engines see when they visit your site.

If you are ready to drop money into SEO or spend hours and days, weeks, months reading up on SEO to be competitive enough on your own... take the time to adjust your browser settings and actually see what they see. Can you follow links from page to page, does your site make sense? Even this is not the full extent of what can be done to test code, but if you make it this far and still have a usable, informative, entertaining website, then the search engines at least have a chance to see your site as you intended.

If your site fails these tests, then before you pursue the search engines as a means of promotion, you will need to fix your code. If you fail this set of tests, then your keywords, your links, and whatever else you do to 'optimize' your site is flawed.

At the very least, good code is the kind of code that allows simple navigation on your site regardless of images and javascript (flash is a graphical language and counts as an image/multimedia). At best, good code is efficient and follows the "less is more" principle.

Less is More

The robots exclusion standard is exactly that... an exclusion. Many webmasters use the meta robots tag to tell spiders to go ahead and index their page and to follow the links that are on it. This is what spiders do naturally anyway. Eliminating this tag when using it to allow spiders will save you some code that does not really need to be loading in browsers at all and spiders assume to be the case anyway.

Another sign of unoptimized code is the use of the font tag in HTML. This and many other tags can be replaced by a single external CSS stylesheet that applies to your entire website. This external sheet gets stored in the browsers cache which means that it only needs to load once for your entire website. How much smaller would your files be if you removed all of your font tags?

Optimizing your code may mean more than just HTML factors. If you use server side code such as ASP or PHP and especially if you are using a database driven website, long lists may bog down your pages and push otherwise quick pages to a 60 second load time or more. This is a sure sign that your quick and peppy (empty) website has some underlying issues now that your internet empire is growing.

Your Empire Grows

By being online and interested in marketing your site, you will come to learn that "content is king". Naturally your website will grow as you seek to promote it and keep it as a useful resource on the web. Good code for growth would need to be highly configurable and uniform throughout your pages.

Good code will allow you to remove sections of your site to place them into external files. As your site grows and new sections are added or removed, your navigation will change. The easiest way to manage this over several hundred pages is to be able to use a single file and include it into your pages using a server side language like PHP or ASP. This way, you can change the links in one file, upload it, and all of your pages will show the new navigation menu. The same may hold true for the footer and header sections of your pages which can change often.

With good coding, possibilities open up that are not available to poorly coded sites that work good on one browser, or several. Updates become easier, search spiders have an easier time of getting through your site, your pages load faster which keeps your visitors happier which keeps them at your site longer...

Shawn Snarski is the owner of Comptrio.com which specializes in the optimization of code and AutoMapIt Sitemaps which uses spider technology. Being on both sides of this issue has led to a better understanding of how spiders and websites interact and how to optimize websites for visitors, servers, and spiders.

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