» Search Friendly Web Design Tip: Clean & Simple Code

This article is part of a series that I’m working to serve as a beginners guide to SEO and search engine friendly website design.

Keeping your website code clean and simple will create a good foundation for a successful search engine friendly website. I’ve worked on too many sites that are just table nightmares with massive amounts of images and tons of missing end tags. All these items mentioned can really degrade how well spiders crawl your pages.

Clean Code

When it comes it to writing code for any website… it should be considered common sense to have clean code. What does clean code mean.. there are a  few things, like making sure that…

• All tags are properly formatted
• All tags have the necessary closing tag
• Code should validate

Simple Code

Being that clean code should be common sense… I think that for good search engine friendly websites, the code should also be very simple and free of overlapping styles as well as being as short and succinct as possible. So how does one achieve this css zen? By utilizing and controlling the basic formatting tags of body, paragraph, h1,h2,h3 and a to do the heavy lifting. For this very reason is why Wordpress is so search engine friendly…  because most good themes have tableless site structure comprised of div id & class tags and use the p,h1, h2 tags to style 90% of the content keeping it very clean & simple.

Well Commented Code

Now having well commented code isn’t neccesarily a search friendly web design tip… but more of a courtesy as you may not always be the one working on a given site. So I find it extremely helpful in maintaining the integrity of the code through future web masters when it is well commented. Plus I think well commented code makes it easier to work with when having to make a quick tweak in the dashboard editor inside Wordpress. I probably over comment my html, php and css files but in the end I know that if someone other than me is working on the code that they will very easily be able to find there way around.

Do you have anything to add on the coding aspect relative to search engine friendly website design? If so share your comments below.