Content is king! Valid markup and quality content
The most important factor when writing for the web is to ensure your audience can find the information they’re looking for without having to read everything. Web users very rarely read everything on a page and if they can’t find what they’re looking for within the first few seconds, they’ll try somewhere else.
The good news is that many of the style related things you can do to make your website more user friendly for people, also make it more user friendly for search engine crawlers.
Structure your content
Use clear titles and subtitles in your content. You should make it painfully obvious what your page is about and what can be found there. Split your content into small sections with titles and use HTML headings, e.g. h1, h3, h3, etc. This will make the layout easier to scan-read for your users, and highlight the important topics on your page for search engines.
Keep it concise
Try to use short sentences, paragraphs and bullet points so that the text can be easily scanned. Again, the HTML markup that you use for this will be used by search engines to determine exactly what is on your page.
Highlight key terms
If you already have your sections marked out with headings, you can further assist your scan-reading users by highlighting the really important terms. Make them bold, use a different colour or make them italic – anything to make them stand out. This process will also help you to pick out keywords and descriptions for your site. For more information on keywords, see Simple SEO Part 2 – Metadata.
Make sure it’s valid
It’s easy to say that if your website looks OK in your browser, then it doesn’t really matter, and even if most of your users can’t tell, a valid website is always favoured by search engines.
You can check your website using the W3C Markup Validation Service. It will tell you how many errors you have and where they are in your code. Don’t be discouraged if you have a lot of errors – it is often the case that one error at the top of the page causes several others further down, but fixing that one error can fix many more.
Link to relevant content
The web is a place to share – get into the spirit by linking to other sites that you have found useful. If you used another website to research your content, link to them. You could even get in touch and let them know – they might link back to you – you never know!
Use helpful link text
Don’t ever, ever, EVER use the words ‘click here’ as the text for one of your links. People started using that back in the day when the internet was a new a scary place, and we didn’t know what links looked like. You’re safe now – if you’re using consistent styles throughout your website, they will be pretty obvious. Using useful, descriptive link text is better for your users and search engines.
This linking technique is not only useful for your users but also… you guessed it… search engines. They recognise and crawl links – so make sure the ones on your site use relevant link text, and if people link to you, try to make sure they use it too!
You can help futher by using helpful link titles – for more information on this, see Simple SEO – Part 2 – Metadata.
Summary
Hopefully this article has given you some food for thought. The golden rule here, and actually for most things on the web – if it’s good for your user, it’s good for search engines, and the more you help one, the more the other will take notice!
We are always happy to assist faithful followers of Butter Side Up, so if you need advice on using these methods or want to improve your website ranking, don’t hesitate to contact us.
