SEF
Search Engine Forums
Helping to make the Web - Since 1998
 |
| . | ||||||||||
| Forums | Index | Active Topics | New Topics | My Topics | Search | My Profile | Register | Inbox | Rules & TOS | |
| . | ||||||||||
Email this thread to a friend
| Previous Topic Next Topic |
| Member | Message |
|
jjtopfl82 Joined: Feb 22, 2002
# Posts: 113
|
Posted: 09/17/2004 12:48 pm
I've heard its rather important to have clean code for your ranking in Google. Of course that makes complete sense. But, for someone like me who's skills are limited to some basic html and without the knowledge of knowing how to clean up the code for my site.... Are there any reliable sites that you can run the code of your site through and have them/it make suggestions of how to clean it up. Or even better... does anyone here do that and feel like helping poor old me out a little 
Thanks! |
 | |
|
squirrel Joined: Eons Ago
# Posts: 120
|
Posted: 09/17/2004 07:49 pm
post your url in your profile and ill see what i can do to help. |
| |
|
g1smd Moderator
Joined: Jul 28, 2002
# Posts: 10126
|
Posted: 09/19/2004 11:05 am
Run it through http://validator.w3.org/detailed.html and that will give you a list of errors. Make sure that your document consists of headings, paragraphs, lists, tables, and forms; that no content hangs in mid-air without a container. Investigate CSS and how that can help you remove the <font> tag code bloat that infests too many sites. There are only about a dozen or so common mistakes that people make seemingly all the time, and another dozen or so that occur quite often. Once you have learnt how to fix all of those, you can easily clean up 99% of all the coding errors out there. |
| |
|
jjtopfl82 Joined: Feb 22, 2002
# Posts: 113
|
Posted: 09/20/2004 09:52 am
Thanks g1smd! A couple other questions. When you do CSS, what programs are best for that? I am very limited in my knowledge of html, especially outside of frontpage. I have dreamweaver but am not very knowledgable when it comes to using it. Are there any online tutorials that are free that can teach you about CSS? |
| |
|
carrucha Joined: Sep 24, 2003
# Posts: 50
|
Posted: 09/20/2004 11:54 am
I like the tutorials at echoecho.com. For CSS check this out http://www.echoecho.com/cssintroduction.htm . About the html validators, many of them will throw errors that aren't very serious or are errors according to some people but not others. Just don't spend too much time making it pass those tests, rather learn which things are bad and which aren't that bad. Maybe some people will disagree, but I don't see a lot of pages that can pass those tests unless they are very small. |
| |
|
jjtopfl82 Joined: Feb 22, 2002
# Posts: 113
|
Posted: 09/22/2004 10:05 am
squirrel.. Thanks! I don't like to post my url in my profile, but I will e-mail it to you. What e-mail should I send it to? Thanks! |
| |
|
g1smd Moderator
Joined: Jul 28, 2002
# Posts: 10126
|
Posted: 09/24/2004 02:40 pm
I write CSS by hand. The code for an entire site might be only a few dozen lines at most. Oh my! 3000 posts |
| |
|
gamiziuk Joined: Aug 23, 2000
# Posts: 630
|
Posted: 09/24/2004 06:46 pm
There is a program named "TopStyle Lite" that can help you write CSS files. Just Google for it and the download site should come up. There is a free and fee version. HTMLHelp-dot-com also offers a CSS Help file you can download as a point of reference. |
| |
|
gamiziuk Joined: Aug 23, 2000
# Posts: 630
|
Posted: 09/24/2004 06:48 pm
Oh my! 300 Posts! 
|
| |
|
g1smd Moderator
Joined: Jul 28, 2002
# Posts: 10126
|
Posted: 09/26/2004 10:51 am
Heh! LOL
|
| |
|
patilprasanna2003 Joined: Jul 10, 2004
# Posts: 32
|
Posted: 10/01/2004 01:35 am
Is it compulsory to validate from w3.org Does it help the site become more search engine friendly. Will this increase search engine ranking for the site. |
| |
|
g1smd Moderator
Joined: Jul 28, 2002
# Posts: 10126
|
Posted: 10/03/2004 01:40 pm
I have found that validating the code, getting all CSS and JS out to external files, writing a good document title and meta description, using heading tags for headings, and making sure the rest of the content is contained in paragraphs, lists, tables and forms has made every site I have modified rocket up the SERPs a few days or weeks later. Well worth doing. |
| |
|
zorgi Joined: Eons Ago
# Posts: 92
|
Posted: 10/03/2004 07:09 pm
One place for CSS: http://codepunk.hardwar.org.uk |
| |
|
Zinger Joined: Mar 04, 2001
# Posts: 293
|
Posted: 10/05/2004 03:22 am
I use Dreamweaver to create web pages - my HTML knowledge is not very good. I just ran a page through the w3 validator and got some errors. The first was about not using 'DOCTYPE'. I don't understand which one I should be using. How do I decide? Can anyone point me in the direction of a tutorial that shows me everything Dreamweaver does that means my pages won't validate. How do I make sure my Dreamweaver pages validate with my serious lack of HTML knowledge - bear in mind when I read the errors and tips on the w3 validator I get lost. Thanks |
| |
|
Ron C Joined: Jul 23, 1999
# Posts: 1468
|
Posted: 10/05/2004 04:38 am
IMO, clean code doesn't improve search engine ranks in the least. Google's goal, after all, is to return relevant SERPs, not validate someone's code as adhering to web standards. You can have a few hundred <font> tags and tables nested inside tables and Google will simply throw them away before analyzing the content. It only takes about one line of program code to strip out all the "not so clean" code. However, while clean code won't improve your ranking, bad code can definitely detract from your ranking. The same program that strips out unnecessary HTML tags can, in bad code, accidentally strip out real content. Consider this line: <font color="red">This is some content</font> HTML tags were specifically formulated for easy parsing, so it's very easy to program a regular expression to match the beginning tag with the ending tag and extract the content between them. That's why the much fussier XHTML standard insists that ALL tags, even those like <br /> that aren't a container, still needs to be closed. A browser parses opening and closing tags so it knows how to display what is between the tags, but a spider, I believe, will do it just to quickly and easily get rid of tags that don't interest it. Now, however, consider this rather badly formed HTML: <font color="red">This is some </font>content</font> This is a pretty simple problem that most browsers would reveal immediately, and I even suspect most spiders would handle without any danger. But it nonetheless suggests the deeper problem of how poorly nested HTML tags can confuse the issue of what is content and what is formatting. In more complex situations, for example when a table or div hasn't been closed, the problems can quickly cascade into spider meltdown. In a perfect world, this shouldn't even be an SE problem, because we would SEE the same thing in our browser that the spider sees when it reads the page and problems would be fixed before they were ever published to the Web. It's not a perfect world, however. Internet Explorer, in an attempt to "help" us, will usually work around a little bad code and still format the page. If you forget to close a table tag, it's usually no big deal for IE to figure out what you meant. This "help" often means that web designers might never even see their mistakes. But the spiders will. One solution, of course, is test your pages in multiple browsers. I've used the old Netscape Navigator 4.7x browser for years to test pages, because it won't let you get away with a darn thing. Forget to close a table tag and NN will just sit there waiting for the closing tag to arrive, usually at a blank screen. Unfortunately, as I turn to more complex CSS-2 design, it is becoming increasingly difficult to test in 4.7x. Validation can be an important step, especially since it helps insure cross-browser compatibility. If the code validates, you can be pretty darn certain the spider can read it without any problems, too. But I would guess that less than one percent of the four billion pages in Google's index would probably validate. Obviously, that doesn't stop them from ranking well. Let me add, before I close, that while I don't think clean code will improve SE ranks, I do think it can greatly improve the user experience. A few hundred embedded <font> tags might not make any difference to Googlebot, but it will make a big difference to me when I visit your site, especially if it means the page takes twice as long to load. Using CSS-1, moving things to external files so they can be cached, avoiding deeply nested structures, all of these things can transform a page that drags across the screen into one that is a delight to find. |
| |
|
Zinger Joined: Mar 04, 2001
# Posts: 293
|
Posted: 10/05/2004 09:42 pm
the validator says all my images must have an alt attribute but i don't want to add allt text to all images because i don't want to change my keyword densities. What does everyone here do about alt attributes? Do you make sure every image has one or only some? Thanks. BTW, I cleaned up my code on one homepage (not entire site) after reading this thread 2 days ago. I manually removed a number of neadless font tags dreamweaver added and used some CSS instead. The page jumped a good 15 places - of course this could be Google updating as my changes were only made 2 days ago. |
| |
|
mikeyb101 Joined: Apr 30, 2002
# Posts: 37
|
Posted: 10/06/2004 04:46 am
If you don't want to add alt attributes but still have valid code you can put alt="" and it will validate |
| |
|
g1smd Moderator
Joined: Jul 28, 2002
# Posts: 10126
|
Posted: 10/06/2004 02:13 pm
I always laugh at this search result. Shame about the malformed tags like title> and /title>and so on. |
| |
| Previous Topic Next Topic |
Switch to Advanced Editor and ... Create a New Topic or Reply to this Thread |
Related Forum Topics
- we were got out of google! (In: Google)
- Google Maps (In: Google)
- Google does not index the home page of my site (In: Google)
- Any Google disaster this week??? (In: Google)
- Google suddenly categorized my site as "blogs" (In: Google)
© 1995 - 2006 · iWeb, Inc · DBA JimWorld Productions