SEO Elements | Website Technical Quality

The technical quality of any website is a significant factor in the level of success it brings. Some technical elements are outlined below.

How fast a page loads is important now and will only become more important in the immediate future with the growth of portable internet devices. If a page is slow to load a user may leave the site before the content is displayed.

The website host influences the speed the site loads so choosing the right host for your site is important. If you have a Google account you can use Google Webmaster Tools to track your website’s page load times..

You should make sure all images on a page are as compressed as far as possible without losing quality. They should also be no bigger than the size they are defined as within the HTML.

Gif and jpg formats are suitable but where possible use web-safe colours so you can use gifs as often as possible. For simple fade effects always use single pixel wide or high images and stretch them to fill the area you require.

The smaller the markup is the faster it will be read by the browser. Make sure the HTML/XHTML is free from invalid classes and tags or unused CSS. This will keep the size to a minimum and reduce the number of validation errors the browser has to deal with.

Getting rid of validation errors is important because different browsers tend to treat the invalid markup differently which can result in the page being displayed incorrectly in some browsers.

Make sure the navigation on your site is useable by “bots” as well as humans. Bots are the scripts used by the search engines to read your site content. Use html navigation that bots can crawl so they can find your other site pages. Avoid Javascript navigation that cannot be followed by bots.

You should create a sitemap page in html that allows visitors to find any page on the site by following the links. The links should be laid out in such a way so as to represent the structure of the site navigation.

An xml sitemap is a document you add to the root of your website (the same folder as your homepage). This document is the equivalent of your sitemap page but in a format that the bots can read quickly. These sitemaps will help your website pages get cached by the search engines.

SEO Elements - Website Technical Quality