Search Engine Optimization – Clean Code

Not all code is created equal!

This is the second in a series of five articles on Search Engine Optimization – Back to the Basics.

One of the strongest factors of a website that ranks well is the code itself.  This is something that most small business owners never even consider.  If a site looks good, as far as they are concerned, it’s a good site.

However, the coding plays a big part in how well your website ranks in the search engines.  If your site has a lot of unnecessary code to compensate for lack of technical ability on the part of your web designer, that can cause a problem.

I see this alot with small companies who sign up for cheap web sites because they can build it themselves.  The companies offering such sites have done so many things to make the sites dummy proof that there is an extremely high amount of unnecessary code.  This is true for scripts as well.  Scripts are small (sometimes not so small) pieces of code that make a site function a certain way.

Every bit of code and every script that is required to make your site function properly can potentially slow down the amount of time it takes for your site to load.  Site load time has always been a factor in rankings, but just recently Google made an announcement that page load times are going to be a bigger factor in rankings and have even provided some tools in Webmaster Tools so that site owners can measure their page load times and take steps to improve it.  Keep in mind that if your site is built on one of the do-it-yourself platforms mentioned above that you will have little to no control over these factors.

Our own site is built on the WordPress platform, which, in my opinion, is a very well coded system.  It is an open-source platform so there are literally thousands of programmers around the world working on it every day to make it better.  Every site we have built on the WordPress platform performs significantly better in search results, even than the sites we had previously optimized on other platforms.

It just takes a few seconds to look at a site and tell if there are issues with bloated code.  Give me a call or send me an email and I’ll be glad to take a quick look at your site.

If you would like to know all the other factors affecting your rankings, you may want to consider our Comprehensive Website Marketing Analysis.

Tomorrow we’re going to talk about your on-page content as a ranking factor.

To your success!
Ken Partain