SEO Resources - Frequently Asked Questions
Why is Meaningful Markup Important for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
In the early days of the Internet, things were pretty simple. Webmasters used raw HTML to present their pages. Design techniques consisted of little more than adding tiling background images, inserting some animated GIFs and manipulating typography using <font> tags. HTML tags were primary in the focus of web coders - they used <h1< and <h2> tags, <p> tags, <quote> tags, etc to organize their pages. Then came table-based layouts. Webmasters realized that by manipulating the parameters of HTML tables they could actually customize the layout of their web pages. As a result, however, source code started becoming more cluttered and less readable by human beings. Complicated WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) editors were required to manage complex table-based layouts. Hand-coding websites became tricky if not impossible.
You might be thinking, "well, so what? It looks good for the users so it works for me." Well, you're definitely right to be focusing on the user experience. It is, after all, a hugely important facet of web design. However, half of the battle happens to be getting your website found, and the best way by far to do that is by getting Search Engine traffic. So what does a table-based layout do for a Search Engine bot responsible for indexing your page content and ranking your page for keywords?
It slows it down.
It gets confused.
This is where Meaningful Markup comes into play. The best way to see your site the way a Search Engine sees it is by looking at your source code. Go ahead - pull up your site in your favorite browser and choose the option to view the source code of whatever page you're on. Try to read it. See if you can make sense of it. Having trouble finding the content in the nested <table>, <tr> and <td> tags? Presentational things like width values, height values, colors and fonts getting in the way? Those lovely header images you Photoshopped are just <img> tags for a Search Engine - and if you're not using ALT text they may as well be invisible.
The problem here is that Search Engines are quite different from users. They don't see, or particular care about, the aesthetics of your site. They're interested in content - quality content, organized content with proper HTML tags and not awash in a flood of presentation parameters.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) allow you to build websites the old fashioned way - primarily using HTML tags to organize the hierarchy of information - and then apply CSS (through an external file) to move things around, set colors, fonts, sizes, etc.
The result? Clean code with a high density of content that the Search Engines can access and index quickly and with ease. The result of that? Higher rankings.
Coupled with a good amount of link building, the full utilization of Meaningful Markup can spell huge SEO success for your website.
