SEO, HTML and Web Site Architecture

With hundreds of millions of users entering hundreds of billions of queries into major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing, the importance of designing a site to be search-engine friendly cannot be underestimated. However, even the most experienced designers and developers can make simple mistakes that can cost their site thousands of views and (potentially) uncounted revenues.

HTML Issues

Sometimes, the “old-fashioned” methods are still the most effective. While many SEO experts have debated the degree of effectiveness of old-school metatags and how they affect search engine rankings, the common belief is that their presence is helpful, especially since spiders often crawl through much of the text content of each page they index.

Page Title

The first place most spiders crawl through is the page’s title tag. When a search engine finds a word in a title tag that matches the search terms, the results page displays that title in bold text. The bold text catches the reader’s eye and causes a nearly instinctive compulsion to click on that link. As the specificity of the search terms increase, so does the importance of the title tag.