Ever wonder how the search engines “see” your site? There’s a quick way for all of you Firefox users to get a rough idea. Try disabling style sheets. View-> Page Style-> No Style. (Unfortunately IE doesn’t provide a similar easy means of disabling style sheets.)
What do you see? Does your website still make sense? Is your company name and tag line still prominent and easy to spot, or is it now cloaked in 12 point Times anonymity like everything else on the page? Do you see a bunch of great looking images with elegant typography describing the products and services you’re trying to draw attention to? I hate to break it to you, but the search engines don’t.
SEO starts with good code. Make sure your programmer builds your pages using standards compliant, semantic markup. Semantic markup is essentially a fancy way of saying “use HTML’s built-in heading code to indicate a heading, not the built in paragraph code.” It sounds like common sense (well, to us it does anyway) but you’d be surprised how often web designers get caught up in creating eye candy and overlook this essential best practice.
If you’re feeling brave and want to to know more about this stuff, be able to impress your Internet marketing folk, and generally have a great handle on where your site needs to be to get results, take a look at these resources on semantic (and standards compliant) markup and SEO coding best practices:
http://www.456bereastreet.com/lab/developing_with_web_standards/full/
http://www.digital-web.com/articles/seo_and_your_web_site/
Latest Comments