SEO Step By Step Guide– 112. Why is the coding standard important for SEO

There is an ongoing debate that whether we should be worried about the coding standards as long as the site is functional and whether the coding standards are likely to affect our website’s SEO performance. Though most of us would like to ignore this factor and conveniently say that search engines do not read through the codes but only the content so let us concentrate on optimizing the content properly, the truth is that you can ruin your website’s online performance very badly by not paying attention to your coding standards.

Just to give you a simple example, if you don’t pay attention to a standardized coding style you are likely to be random. One of the most common places of mistake is the area of domain reference. In some places you will be referring to the homepage as www.xyzdomain.com and in other places you will be referring the homepage as xyzdomain.com. Though in these two instances you will be lead to the homepage, for search engines these two are entirely different pages. You will unnecessarily lose the effectiveness of your linking. At another level, you should have used 301 redirects to ensure that both the URLs namely www and non-www addresses resolve at the same page. If you miss to do this, search engines will consider these two as different domains. This will unnecessarily reduce the effectiveness of your link campaign you will get only half the benefit of what you should actually get.

Secondly, incomplete tags can turnout to be a source of irritation to the search engines. Make sure therefore, your coding is thorough and no half-baked work is done.

Good coding will help your site to perform well because if you follow poor coding standards, it will block your other SEO efforts from bearing good results. Though good coding standards as many opine does not actively get good rankings for your website, it certainly does hinder your success when you are not going to follow good coding standards.

So don’t lose the benefits unnecessarily. Make sure that you are hiring a professional web development company that is aware of the SEO concepts. Even if they are not aware of the SEO concepts, they should at least be good at what they are doing namely, coding. If you can find a web development company that has experience with SEO, then that will be the best option for you. If you cannot find a web development company that is not conversant with SEO principles, at least after the completion of the site, have it reviewed by an SEO professional so that they can recommend the necessary changes. SEO is not just creating keyword rich content; it is a holistic approach that tries to offer the users with the best online experience by helping them find what they want in the shortest time possible.

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