Since nowadays most internet visits are done via Mobile Phones and Tablets, having Responsive Website Design Layout is a must! Beautiful presentation on all screen sizes allows good user experience and brings more business! Google knows that and prefers websites that have good flowing responsive design.
OnSite Search Engine Optimization the second most important factor for successful ranking. In the previous post we spoke about Page Titles, and now we are going to cover in depth the page content optimization and specially content presentation.
Page content is all visible information on the one page. This content can be text, images, videos, sounds and etc, but only one of those elements is very important for your search engine rankings. Since search engine robots are not humans and they cannot understand the meanings of visual and audio elements the only thing that they can understand is Text. Using complex algorithms Search Engine Robots read the text and run Digestive algorithms which clean it from junk and repetitive words and then rank whatever is left in their index based on keywords and key-phrases. That’s why the repetition of keywords and key-phrases is extremely important for your ranking as search engines must be able to highlight them as being the description of your page and therefore rank for your targeted keywords instead of something else that’s on your page. (I’ll write separate article on keyword density because that’s a whole other science)
There are few ways to help search engines understand better your website and that’s with the so called “clean html style”. This is not a text writing style but rather text formatting style. As you know and I believe you share my opinion that well formatted newspapers and magazines that allow you to read between the lines (aka highlighting with strong and bold in html) and the use of different font sizes in titles, subtitles, quotations and etc is extremely helpful not only to visitors but also to Search Engines.
Search Engines just like visitors are able to read your text formatting and according to the highlights they also understand what’s important for that page and rank it with priority over non-bold and non-highlighted texts.
I’m strongly advising everyone of you to write well in clean html and if you don’t know HTML then its very good for your own knowledge to get some book and read it. Its nice and really helpful especially if you’re considering your website for something more than just one time experience.
Another thing that I always recommend to webmasters is to validate their website’s html syntax using HTML validators. Nowadays most of the Website Development Software is with built in error highlighting and offers html validation search and that’s really good because it helps search engines understand your website properly as html coding errors can sometimes mislead them in the meaning of some elements that might be vital to good ranking. When you publish your website you can use the Free HTML Validator from W3C http://validator.w3.org/.
To the people that don’t know what W3C is, W3C stand for World Wide Web Consortium and it’s the governing body of the internet website standards. If you visit their website www.w3.org you can find so much useful information on website coding standards and new technologies like XHTML and AJAX.
If you keep your syntax error free and you format your pages with all proper html markup tags Search Engines will be able to easily understand your websites and rank you very high for your targeted keywords. On the other hand if your websites are not very well written and contain a lot of errors then you might end up somewhere on the big list, but it won’t be the top.
Please do not forget the RULE that you’re making websites for PEOPLE not for ROBOTS! Make them nice, make them look good, make them convince people to come back again and read more. This is the best possible strategy to rank well. Search Engines are improved every day and their ranking is based on how PEOPLE would feel about your website and this underlines the importance of good page layout and presentation. If you have well presented website that looks like a magazine or newspaper, sooner or later you will be ranked top for your keywords! That’s where search engines are heading and this can only help you!