Search Engine–Friendly website HTML structure

Published: 18th March 2011
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HTML Structural Elements
In general, HTML provides structural elements that may help a search engine understand the overall
topicality of documents, as well as where logical divisions and important parts are located, such as


and

tags, tags, and so on. If you don’t include these elements in your HTML code, the search
engine must make such decisions entirely itself.

Copy Prominence and Tables
Copy prominence is the physical depth — that is, the actual position (counted in bytes) in the HTML
document where the copy starts within your document. Because search engines may consider the content
closest to the top of the HTML document more important, it is wise to avoid placing repetitive or
irrelevant content before the primary content on a page.
A common form of content that doesn’t need to be at the top of an HTML file is JavaScript code. It is
wise to move any JavaScript code located at the top of an HTML document either to the bottom, or to
a separate file, because JavaScript has a large footprint and is mostly uninteresting to a spider. You can

reference external JavaScript files as follows:

The other common manifestation of this problem is that many tables-based sites place their site navigation
element on the left. This use of tables tends to push the primary content further down physically,
and because of this, may contribute to poorer rankings. If there are many navigational elements above
the primary content, it may confuse the search engine as to what is actually the primary content on the
page, because the navigational elements are higher physically in the document.
Search engines do try to detect repetitive elements, such as a navigation elements placed physically
before the primary content on a page, and at least partially ignore them. Modern search engines also
examine the actual displayed location of content rather than just their physical location in a source document.
However, avoiding the situation entirely may improve the odds of proper indexing regardless.
There are three solutions for this:

- Instead of using a tables-based layout, use a pure CSS-type layout where presentation order is
arbitrary.
- Place the navigation to the right side of the page in a tables-based layout.
- Apply a technique that designers typically call the table trick, which uses an HTML sleight-of-hand
to reverse the order of table cells physically in the document without reversing their presentation.
Even if your site uses tables, typically, parts of a document can be rendered using CSS layout on a
selective basis. Doing so does not force you to abandon a tables-based layout completely. A good place
to look is in repetitive elements (that is, those generated within loops), such as navigational elements
and repeated blocks to shrink HTML size, because tables tend to have a large footprint.

Frames
There have been so many problems with frames since their inception that it bewilders us as to why anyone
would use them at all. Search engines have a lot of trouble spidering frames-based sites. A search
engine cannot index a frames page within the context of its other associated frames. Only individual
pages can be indexed. Even when individual pages are successfully indexed, because another frame is
often used in tandem for navigation, a user may be sent to a bewildering page that contains no navigation.
There is a workaround for that issue (similar to the popup navigation solution), but it creates still
other problems. The noframes tag also attempts to address the problem, but it is an invisible on-page
factor and mercilessly abused by spammers. Any site that uses frames is at such a disadvantage that
we must simply recommend not using them at all.

Using Forms
A search engine spider will never submit a form. This means that any content that is behind form navigation
will not be visible to a spider. There is simply no way to make a spider fill out a form; unless the
form were to consist of only pull-downs, radios, and checkboxes — where the domain is defined by permutations
of preset values, it could not know what combinations it submits regardless. This is not done
in practice, however.
There are some reports that Google, in particular, does index content behind very simple forms.
Forms that consist of one pull-down that directs the user to a particular web page are in this
category. However, as with the example of JavaScript links being spidered, we do not recommend
depending on this behavior. As a corollary, if such a form points to content that should be excluded,
it may be wise to exclude the content with an explicit exclusion mechanism, such as robots.txt
or the robots meta tag!
There is no magic solution for this problem. However, there is a workaround. As long as your script
is configured to accept the parameters from a GET request, you can place the URLs of certain form
requests in a sitemap or elsewhere in a site.
So if a form submits its values and creates a dynamic URL.



My self is james and i like to publish useful information regarding seo and currently, i work on link building especially for directory submission, article submission and social bookmarking.

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Source: http://jamesdaksh.articlealley.com/search-enginefriendly-website-html-structure-2126977.html


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