Messy Code is Bad Code for SEO
June 6 2009
When you or I go to a website, what we see is the beautiful mixture of color, very nice graphics, and an overall good looking site. Or…A bad looking site. However, what we see is that the site has a certain look to it that the owner is probably trying to achieve by creating the site. However, what we don’t see anywhere is what the code looks like. We make see a table and go, “Oh, that’s a table.” But, we don’t actually visualize what the code is when we are looking at the site because that would be a little silly.
The exact opposite, though, takes place when we’re talking about the bots that come to a site from a search engine. They don’t get to really see the beautiful aesthetics of a website. They look at what the code is saying and they determine what’s going on with that code. For example, the bot doesn’t know what the image looks like, but when the Alt tag is put in properly, the search engine is able to know that the picture of a Doberman is exactly that. However, what happens when the site starts to get more intricate?
The more code there is, the more the search engine has to decipher through in trying to figure out what everything is. In other words, a simple site with a few alt tags and some meta keywords at the top might rank well, but to get more and more content on the site, there needs to be a good navigation system. This results in the code getting more intricate which results in the possibility of the code getting a little mumbled.
This is incredibly important to avoid. If the code gets messy, the bots are unable to pick out what is important and what isn’t important. The bots may miss a keyword you really want to try and achieve. The bot may deindex the site simply because the site appears to still be under construction when, in actuality, the site is all completed, but very messy. Because of these reasons, it is important to find someone that can go in and really make sure that all the tags are fixed and to ensure that there are no errors in the coding.
You can find anyone to do it, but you want someone good. For example, if you were in the Atlanta area, you could hire an Atlanta Web Development team to do it for you. They’d go in and really meticulously figure out what needs fixing and what doesn’t. Ensuring that each tag has its brackets and there are no errors is an example of on site SEO. I’ve said time and time again that to achieve high rankings, you need strong on site SEO and strong off site SEO. Only then will you succeed.
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