Optimizing HTML Constructs for Search Engines

At first, the web was made up in great part by research papers posted by academics. They were formatted in a specific way, and most of them were heavily text-based. These days, the Internet contains document types of every shape and size. Images, videos, and Flash pages — you name it, someone’s built it — all serve their purposes in the construction of a successful web site. (You can find more about optimizing media content in the “Choosing the Right Navigation” section, later in this chapter and still more on video optimization in Book V, Chapter 2.) Nevertheless, when you get down to the basic structure for a web page, you’re still looking at HTML.

HTML pages are the building blocks of your web site, so it’s worth it to take the time to construct them well. Unlike humans, search engines evaluate pages based on the code. Because search engines cannot understand images or similar content forms, that content is invisible to them, leaving them to only see the content in the text of an HTML page. You want to write your code so that it will be very easy for spiders to understand. You don’t want to bury the content down in the code. This is intuitively obvious to web designers and seasoned search engine optimizers, but many people don’t take the time to put it into practice. In the following sections, we break down, define, and explain how you can best optimize each of the so-called on-page....