SEO the technical way
28.03.2011
“Content SEO” is a solid investment, but if your site has a shaky technical foundation, then you’ll hit a glass ceiling in overall SEO performance.
Many companies spend a deal of their precious marketing budget on consultants to tweak and tune their content to improve what they call their “SEO performance” – their ranking in Google, Bing, Yahoo and other important sources of new client traffic. What then happens is that they then reach a glass-ceiling – whatever they seem to do doesn’t make any difference to their ranking. This is because “Content SEO”, although absolutely critical, is still only a part of the story; what they have neglected is “Technical SEO”. In other words, if their pages are poorly constructed, however optimal the content on the page is, it cannot be properly interpreted by the crawlers.
If this scenario sounds a little familiar, the obvious question is going to be “How do I know if my pages are poorly constructed?” The first step is to run a couple of simple tests – one of them is to validate your html (or xhtml) and the other your CSS compliance
1. World Wide Web consortium’s (x)html validation tool
2. World Wide Web consortium’s CSS validation tool
More than likely you’re being given a fair number of errors and warnings. This indicates that there are errors in the code or content of your site that can create a range of problems – for example making it difficult for a crawler to read your content properly (Note: the errors also indicate all sorts of other issues such as cross-browser compatibility issues, accessibility issues, etc.)
These tests do not tell the whole story, but they are an indication of the care that has been taken in coding your site. And, one should note, because of changes to standards, if your site is more than a couple of years old, even if it passed all the tests back then, it won’t today.
If you want to dig deeper into the structure and technical quality of your site from an SEO perspective, there are a couple of good commercial applications on the market. One of them is the SortSite tool by PowerMapper, and the other is the by SEO Power Suite (specifically the “Web Site Auditor”) by Link-assistant.
So what do you do once you’ve run these tests and find out that your site has a number of areas that need addressing? Well, give us a call of course :-)