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E-Marketing Performance Blog

Cleanliness is next to easier spidering

You may not realize it, but your site code may be overly-bloated. Many sites, especially ones created with an HTML editor such as Dreamweaver or Frontpage, have “bloated” code, meaning it has extra tags, styles, tables, etc.

The first thing you need to do to clean your code is to check and make sure all your tags have a closing tag and all your closing tags have a beginning tag. Once you have removed any excess tags, then you start to look at what could be removed.

One thing that could really help is removing styles from the page and putting them in an off-page style sheet. Font tags can be removed and added to the style sheet as well. Anything that has a style sheet equivalent can be removed from the page and put on the style sheet. This process can remove quite a bit of code and save you a little space on the side.

The next thing is to check your tables. Many people have an excessive amount of tables on their page. There are other ways to get the same placement of elements or at least nearly the same placement using style sheet and spacing (vspace, hspace, padding, etc.). Try to remove as many tables as possible while keeping the integrity of the look of the page.

The good thing about cleaning out the code bloat is that it slims down your page (obviously) making it a quicker download, but it also helps the spiders out. Yes, it actually helps the spider bots. It makes sense. The less code you have, the easier it is for them to find what they want and it makes the most important information, such as the text, more accessible without the spiders having to sift through pointless tags and endless tables. What you want the spiders to find will be easier for them to find. It’s that simple.

Now the last thing you want to do is to validate your site code using W3C’s HTML validator. This helps to find any last problems with the code.

So go on and go clean out your site, just like spring cleaning, only without having to clean the garage.

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