This is the first blog in a series that I am going to be doing, discussing various methods that can be used when designing a website to help it from a search engine optimisation perspective.
Step 1 is going to begin right at the top of the HTML behind the scenes on a web page, with specifying a DOCTYPE for your page and the correct information in the <head> of a document.
A DOCTYPE declaration at the top of a webpage is telling the browser what type of HTML is being used on that page.
It is not possible to have a "valid" page without a DOCTYPE being specified at the begining of a document. We have recently seen some examples of a newly validated site performing much better than it had previously unvalidated. Depending on whether you choose strict, transitional or frameset, you should ensure that the code following it conforms to this standard.
From a non SEO perspective, pages can display strangely without a DOCTYPE being specified, as it defaults to a "quirks" mode.
You can find more information about the type of DOCTYPES that can be used here.
Also in the top of an HTML page it is necessary to specify a number of “tags” in the <head> of a page. This is the area where the Title, Meta Description and Meta Keywords tag are specified.
The Title certainly is very important, and will have a blog dedicated to it at a later stage.
Although most search engines tend to now ignore meta data as a ranking factor, it is still important to include a unique meta description on every page of a site since the meta description will often be used in the snippet of text shown in the search engine listings.
With this in mind, it is important to create a line of copy that will tempt people into clicking on your listing.
The Meta Keywords tag is of much less importance nowadays, certainly with any kind of engine that you want to be driving traffic to your site, I would now say this is an optional tag, and does not have to be included.
One last tag that can be useful is a Meta Robots tag, which tells search engines whether or not they can follow links off a page or index a page. Personally, wherever possible I would prefer to use a robots.txt file, but there are circumstances where this can be used.
There are many other tags that I see in the <head> of a document. However, these are nearly all rubbish irrelevant tags that just slow the loading time of your page down (well only slightly for a couple, but nontheless it’s a waste). Any abstract, author, copyright, return after?. as well asall the other tags that many popular web page construction programs add to a page are pretty pointless really.
Keep your eyes peeled for the next installment coming up in the next few days.
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