There are things that search engines want from your website and you should make sure that you can fulfil them. First of all, search engine bots will crawl your website much more easily when the navigation structure is simple and based on simple links. Years ago, many websites used Flash-based animation for the navigation. They look nice and can display plenty of pretty animation effects with mouse hover and mouse click actions. However, bots are not able to get through the Flash animation and crawl the links. You should make sure that your website navigation isn’t based on complicated things. Search engines also find it preferable if scripts are called from external files. This will help to make your webpage to have less code and it will be easier for bots to index it. In general, bots want to index your actual content and you won’t make it easier for them to do the task if you include too many code lines in each webpages. You should make sure that you have higher content to code ratio, so the indexing process can be performed much more easily.
A good way to simplify your webpage coding structure is to use CSS. It means that you will be able to adjust the layout of your webpage in the simplest manner possible. One advantage with using CSS is that you can call CSS code from external files. Again, this will make each of your webpage to become more structured. Another thing you should consider is to remove excessive comments or at least, significantly reduce them, if you still need to keep the essential ones. Normally, bots ignore comments inside your HTML code, but it will be much better to keep your webpage slim and meaningful. In order to make it easier for bots to crawl your website, it is a good idea to ensure that picture links have alt tags. Google Image and other image search services are also good sources of traffic and you should make sure that you get some hits from them. If alt tags have relevant keywords based on the images, you can make sure that it will be displayed better and more relevantly in Google Image.
While JavaScript is safer to use compared to Flash, you also shouldn’t overuse it. As an example, it may not be a good idea to use JavaScript to build your flyout or dropdown menus. This is actually an old implementation and it is better to use simple links as the basis of your navigation. Bots will find that your navigation is easy to follow and all of your webpages will be crawled. It is perfectly possible to have good website design with simple HTML implementation. In fact, it has become a trend in recent years to use simple, but elegant design, with plenty of white space. After ensuring that your HTML codes are simplified, you should validate them using the HTML Validator. Although this task has no direct implication to your SEO project, but it is a good thing if you have followed the HTML best practice guidelines.
