Web Development is Critical for SEO

More often than not, we can work with a poorly coded website with a few minor tweaks here and there. Naturally, we prefer to get our hands really dirty and clean things right out if the budget allows for it. In design, Semantic Markup (check the w3c standards) is our goal and should be everyone’s goal for many reasons. SEO should be included as one of those reasons. Again though, there’s more to it than that because we have been able to rank sites well with poor code and even a poor site structure. But if you’re in a very competitive arena, you are going to have to do everything right in order to be a significant player online. I’ll give you a couple of recent bugbears from the SEO development perspective.

Steer Clear of DIY websites – Templates are easy, there is no denying it and they can be cheap. Services like Homestead and BuildYourSite.com allow you to get some web presence, often for the same cost of hosting. Unfortunately there is a price to pay and generally SEO will suffer. You’re locked into a poor site structure, a great deal of cruft, sometimes no chance for altering Meta Data and don’t get me started on cross browser compatibility.

Check Server Settings – there’s a lot that can go wrong with a server but there’s also a lot of poorly configured settings that can really hamper a good SEO campaign. Most of them are fairly technical and some that even I don’t get, but a good poke around will often yield some unusual results which will prompt a real techy to investigate. Just as well we have a couple. Problems that you may come across include downtime, slow loading (poor code could also be responsible), redirection issues, server side includes, dirty IP’s, problems can be many and varied and should not be discounted for poor rankings.

Page Errors – Search Engines don’t like website issues. Broken links are a no-no. Page Not Found seems to annoy them (and users). Unreachable URL’s and other crawl blocking set-ups can be heaqvily punished.

Site and URL structure – Google has made it perfectly clear that they like things that make sense and life easier for them and users. A shallow site structure is highly regarded. Instead of having a page within a folder, within a folder, why not have the page within the root of the server or a single folder? Also, how about naming that page something that’s easy to remember like /nice-page.html instead of /nice.php?id=23426page. Google says this last one doesn’t really matter but I have a feeling it does and it makes linking to your website so much easier.

That’ll do me for today but it should drive home the point that design and development is an integral component for SEO. If you’re serious about it, you will look at addressing these elements instead of continuing to bang your head against the wall building links, creating content and doing everything else correctly.

PaulFleming is co-founder and VP of Interactive Services for Dinkum Interactive. A trained teacher, Paul has worked in a variety of forms of Internet Marketing but with a focus on SEO. Originally from Australia, he now resides in Philadelphia with his wife and 2 ankle-biters.