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HTML Structural Elements

In general, HTML provides structural elements that may help a search engine understand the overall

topicality of documents, as well as where logical divisions and important parts are located, such as

<h1>

and

<h2>

tags,

<b>

tags, and so on. If you don’t include these elements in your HTML code, the search

engine must make such decisions entirely itself.

Although most hand-coded sites do well in this regard, especially when a search engine marketer is

involved, many content management systems are abysmally bad at it. Also, WYSIWYG (What You See Is

What You Get) editors typically do not use these tags, and tend to generate HTML with CSS embedded

pervasively in style tags. This is not ideal with regard to search engine optimization. For example, this

structure:

<ol>

<li>Item 1</li>

<li>Item 2</li>

<li>Item 3</li>

</ol>

provides more semantic information than this:

<img src=’bullet.gif’>Item 1<br>

<img src=’bullet.gif’>Item 2<br>

<img src=’bullet.gif’>Item 3<br>

even if they look entirely identical onscreen.

If you’ve developed web content using a WYSIWYG editor, it may be wise to hand-edit the generated

HTML to optimize the content after the fact. You may also choose to create your HTML directly instead

of using such an editor. An additional solution of using a custom markup language is explored later in

this chapter.

Copy Prominence and Tables

Copy prominence is the physical depth — that is, the actual position (counted in bytes) in the HTML

document where the copy starts within your document. Because search engines may consider the con-

tent closest to the top of the HTML document more important, it is wise to avoid placing repetitive or

irrelevant content before the primary content on a page.

A common form of content that doesn’t need to be at the top of an HTML file is JavaScript code. It is

wise to move any JavaScript code located at the top of an HTML document either to the bottom, or to

a separate file, because JavaScript has a large footprint and is mostly uninteresting to a spider. You can

reference external JavaScript files as follows:

<script language=”JavaScript” src=”my_script.js”></script>

When referencing external JavaScript files, don’t omit the

</script>

tag. If you do that, Internet

Explorer won’t parse your script.

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Chapter 6: SE-Friendly HTML and JavaScript

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