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How much does semantic design improve SE access?

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jendeacott

Programmer
Feb 11, 2005
36
GB
Hi,

I'm just wondering how much better it is for search engines to read / access your pages when you have:

A lean page of structural XHTML with a referring CSS for all style.

Instead of a XHTML page that has inline styles, fonts etc

I know that JavaScript can cause problems in the head, but does any other part of the code affect readability for the robots?

Many Thanks
John


Find out you can improve your plant security and plant tracking
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Firstly, semantic markup means that you use logical elements for parts of your page. For example, if you have a list of items (or a menu) use list elements. It is still possible to create valid code that isn't semantic as such.

Creating valid markup will help in the sense that there is less superfluous content for the crawler to digest before it gets to the meat of the page.

It may also be of benefit as there should be no errors in the markup that may confuse the crawler and the document tree is easy for the crawler to traverse.

Creating semantic markup will make it easier for you and your users to manipulate the information on the page and display it how they see fit.

It's certainly not going to harm your page and will in fact make it easier for you to maintain the site etc.

You should, of course, be making the page for people rather than to please a search engine though. If you do that using standards compliant, semantic markup then the search engines will also find it easy to index your content.

Foamcow Heavy Industries - Web design and ranting
Toccoa Games - Day of Defeat gaming community
Target Marketing Communications - Advertising, Direct Marketing and Public Relations
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SEs do not "see" the page in the same way as browsers do so how you build your page will make little or no difference to SE indexing.

The difference is for usability. Javascript, In-page stylesheets and in-line style simply add to the page size (in bytes) so increase download times. Moving these to external files means that they are downloaded once and cached by the browser. The SE problem (for Google anyway) is the arbitary byte limit that the crawler will retrieve. It may be the crawlers memory buffer or possibly it's the space allocated in the database for pagecode cache storage. This is 101k so if your page code (excluding images and external files) weighs in at above this it will be truncated in the cache and sections of your page will not be analysed.

If the javascript has to be in the page block it out with comment tags. Browsers ignore HTML comments "<!--" inside script tags and SE indexers skip over anything inside comments. This will avoid the possibility of your script code appearing as a description snippet.

There are excellent reasons why you should use
A lean page of structural XHTML with a referring CSS for all style.
None are SE related but all about usability and improving the site for visitors.


Chris.

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So long, and thanks for all the fish.
 
I still think semantic markup helps a bit though because it's more likey that your page is coded correctly.
Also content is more likely to be in a logical order.
It's not the "be all and end all" but it's definitely a good thing to code semantically anyway.

Foamcow Heavy Industries - Web design and ranting
Toccoa Games - Day of Defeat gaming community
Target Marketing Communications - Advertising, Direct Marketing and Public Relations
"I'm making time
 
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