Clean up Your Code for Good SEO
Do you have lots of JavaScript coding in the header section of your web pages? Do you re-list your CSS styles at the top of every page? Do you have JavaScript coding spread throughout your web pages? If you answered yes to any of these questions your site may be driving away search engine spiders and losing search engine position ranking.
More often then not, when I view the source code of a client that's asking for search engine optimization help, I see gobs of JavaScript and Style Sheet stuff, especially in the header and oftentimes sprinkled throughout the page.
All this extraneous code has the effect of diluting your content, and thus your message, and makes it harder for a search engine to figure out what your page is really about. It has to wade through all this JavaScript and Style stuff before it gets to the meat of the page.
A search engine spider will only read some much code off a page before it gives up. On-page code like JavaScript and Style commands have the added disadvantage of bloating your page size, causing some search engines to bail before they've captured the whole page.
That's why it's important to get your 'real' content and primary keywords as close to the top of the page as possible so the serach engine will encounter it as quickly as possible. If you need to use JavaScript, move it off page into an external file.
<script language="javascript" src="TheScript.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
Do the same thing with your Style Sheet(s) too:
<link href="TheStyleSheet.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet">
By getting this code off the page, you make your pages smaller so they load faster, enable your 'real' content to stand out better and be more easily crawled, and end up with a more efficient site design that will come in handy as you expand in the future.<
About the Author
Dave is a full-time Search Engine Marketing Manager. He also runs SyteSurge, a web site dedicated to search engine optimization and search engine marketing.