Adam Lasnik, Google’s Search Evangelist answered this query. Obviously the answer was, there is no direct correlation between validated code and SEO performance. What he meant was, the there will not be any ranking weightage given to a page because it uses validated code.

This does not mean that one should use any kind of crap HTML coding. It is still very important in SEO perspective. The primary requirement for any page to appear for targetted keyword is that the content should be properly crawled and indexed by GoogleBot.

In my earlier post I have mentioned how to use the w3c validator tool to fine tune your code correcting your validation errors.

If any Googler is reading this post, could you add your valuable comments about this topic?

You migt have seen the HTML image tag like <img src=”something.jpg” height=”200″ width=”100″ alt=”ALTERNATE TEXT” />

The ALTERNATE TEXT is the one which gets shown in the browser just in case the image could not be loaded by the browser. It was primarily for saying what you wanted to convey from the message in the absence of this image.

As per the latest HTML and XHTML standards, its mandatory to keep alternate text in any image we use in a web page.

How this can be used in SEO ?

Image alt attribute is one way to say what your web page talk about. Search engine identify what your page talks about to rank them for search terms. For this search engine crawlers index websites and read the web page content and tags. Main areas a search engine spider will look are meta tags, document title, header tags , content and also alt tags. Alt tag says about an image, and image must be related to what the web page is about too, hence it makes sense.

Its always a good practise to incluse keywords inside the alt attributes for images. Again, do remember stuffing keywords can be harmful anywhere including alt attributes.

Above this its very important for a web developer/SEO to stick to the correct HTML coding standards for better visibility of a web page.

Let me explain why..

Search engine crawlers are just programs created by human beings to read the content from pages and index them. It is programmed to read content from pages based on the common HTML coding conventions. They do not possess high end artificial intelligence to distinguish the tags which is improperly coded. So it is very important for anybody to validate the HTML code for the pages which is meant for search engine optimization.

The World Wide Web consortium is the organization that has set coding standards for the web development languages such as HTML, XHTML etc. Hence they have also provided some tools to validate the code developed by us and match it to the standards.

The validation tool can be located at http://validator.w3.org/ .

You can use this tool in 3 different ways to validate your HTML code – by inputting the URL of the page, by uploading the file from your system to the w3c tool, or by direct input i.e copy-pasting the HTML source code into the text area provided in the tool.

This tool gives a consolidated report pointing the errors on the page, which can be corrected.

So will you purposely keep any link in your site which can end up in ‘Page not found? You shouldn’t..

Google crawler is a simulation of a human being browsing through a site and grasping contents in it. When it find good things, it stores into its memory and pours it out when another person requests for it.

So the same way you hate a site for having broken links in it, Google also must hate them. Do you want Google to hate your site and never want to visit your site? The answer should be no, if you are really concerned with the SEO performance of your site.

How to eliminate broken links in a site?

Broken links can be present in a site due to a simple human error. One way to find them is by checking the links manually. But it becomes tedious when you are checking a medium to heavy website having a good number of pages.

I am using a tool called ‘Xenu’s Link Sleuth’. It’s basically a crawler, which will open up page after page in site and open all the links in it, whether its outbound or within same site. It finally gives you a comprehensive report about the broken links, redirected URL’s and a sitemap of the website.

So will you make sure that your site is free from broken links from now?

Lets get into the topic on how to do OnPage Optimization.

Search Engine Optimization consists of basically two stages – On Page Optimization and Off Page.

OnPage optimization refers to the SEO activities we perform on a page in our site, and offpage optimization refers to the SEO activities we do on external factors which assist in a better ranking of our website.

Basic On Page optimization consists of

• Creating proper content having right keyword density
• Creating a title tag, meta description tag, meta keyword tag
• Creating sentences which is put into header tags h1, h2, h3, h4 etc
• Anchor text in links within the page, title tag for the link (which comes as tool tip)
• Alt tags for images

An optimum keyword density for content (current trend) is about 3-5%. i.e no of keywords / No of total words

Title tag : Its a very important entity of a web page. Its like a unique page number in a book. You need to have a very unique title for each of your pages. A keyword can be repeated in a title tag at the most 2 times (Main keyword of a page must be present in title tag at the starting position for best SEO advantage). A title tag is basically a sentence with not more than 100 characters long. Its a one liner which explains about your page.

Meta Description Tag: Its a brief description about your web page. Again main keyword in description tag carries a lot of importance.

Meta Keyword tag : You can list down the keywords present in the page one after another separated by a comma.

Earlier search engines used to rank pages based only n title, description and keyword tags. But it became obsolete when people started to misuse this fact and search engines developed algorithms to find them.

A major factor to get ranked in Google is the off page factor, which I will be explaining later. Again on page factor is very much required to keep the relevancy of page for a particular keyword.

Header tags: These are another set of tags which the search engines will have a close look at to identify the main keywords on a page. So keeping sentences containing in header tags – h1, h2, upto h4 helps in SEO. Text in H1 tag usually will be of larger size. This can be reduced by use of proper CSS (cascading style sheets).

Alt attributes for ‘img’ tags: Another important location to put your keywords for a page.

An optimum keyword density of should be maintained for the whole document, i.e including title, description, keywords , content, alt tags, header anchors etc. If you stuff keywords into a page, it will serve adverse effects than higher ranking in google.

We will discuss the donts in Onpage optimization in a later stage.

Generally if there is no robots.txt file in the root of your website or it has no instructions written in it, it is interpreted by the crawler that there is no restriction for crawling documents within that site.

On the other hand you may want to hide some documents from being crawled.

Following example show how you can block a document private-data.html from being crawled by bots.

For this you write the robot instruction as below and save in the robots.txt file.

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /private-data.html

Now see the first line, it says which bots should follow these instruction? * indicates that it is applicable for all bots. you can replace it by Googlebot for the crawler used by google alone. Knowing the user agent, such instruction can be written for any bot.

See the second line, it says not to crawl the document private-data.html which is found in the root of the website.

If you want to hide all documents within a directory from crawl, you can write the second line as

Disallow: /directory

Now how these instructions are taken into effect?

Crawler bots of major search engines are programmed to check the instructions found in the robots.txt file before accessing any document in the site in a crawl session. It can be said as a rule for the crawlers. So according to the instructions written, bots continue the crawl process.

Now how to keep your site crawler friendly?

The crawler comes one of your page first, picks up the content from it, it can take out information such as your title, meta tags, body content and can take out the links in that page. Now what the crawler does is it starts visiting the pages to which the current page has been linked to. The crawl process continues.

Making a site crawlable (Making it crawler friendly) is the basic think you need to have for proper indexing of the web site and subsequent ranking.

What you need to do?

As of now, search engine crawlers are not developed to read links in JavaScript, flash etc. So its always better to use proper text links (Normal html hyperlinks) as far as possible. Even in case you are using JavaScript dropdown, you can have text links somewhere in the footer to make the crawling easy. On a trial, the whole website should be able to be navigated just following text links.

Use of Sitemap

A sitemap is a page in your website where you present links to all your pages in your website. Again, this makes the crawling more easily. Once search engine crawler is able to visit sitemap, it can go to any other page in the site which is directly linked.

Now in case you want to restrict crawlers accessing your pages?

This can be done using a document called ‘robots.txt’ in the root of your website. My next post is how to use robots.txt and about creating this robots instruction document.

If you have such questions in mind, read on as the following paragraphs give some insight to it.

You have developed a brand new website and made it live. Now how to get into SERPs ?
The basic thing is Search engine will not come to know about your site unless and until they are made them aware of your new site. Now how to make them know that you got a new website.

There are two methods to do this..
1. Almost all search engines provide an option to add the site to their database. You can look for a ‘Submit Site’ option provided by the search engines to give details of your website.

2. Get a couple of hyperlinks pointed to your new website from another site already found in a search engine index.

Let me explain the second option a bit in detail.

Search engines use program called crawler or bots to fetch out information from a website. The crawler keeps visiting websites on internet and reads out the content from the pages. It also lists out the hyperlinks found in them and adds to its queue for continuing its crawl process.

Now when a new link is being added to a website where search engine crawlers keep visiting, it finds the link to new website and visits the website for getting the contents in it. When it goes into a new site which is not found in the search engine’s daabase, it automatically adds it along with the data fetched from the pages in that website.

First is a more traditional way of getting into a search engine’s database, but second is the most practical way.

Now the search engines has the data fetched from various website in their databse, it assigns ranking positions to those sites depending on relevancy as calculated by its ‘ranking Algorithm’.

If the new site made by you meets the criteria specified in the algorithm, the site is listed on higher positions for queries related to your website.

Different search engines vary in terms of their ranking algorithm. In the next post ‘Treating search engine crawlers’ , I will explain in deep how search engine crawlers aid in ranking a website.

Internet has spread very drastically. Even in countries like India, where most couldn’t use the facilities of internet a year or two back have access to internet on high speed broadband connections.

People started using internet as the medium for information gathering. As the world is moving in a rapid pace, people tend to order things they would like to have, online and paying using electronic money.

This is where search engines started playing a very important role.

Information related to any product or service available can be found out using few simple search queries in any of the popular search engines. So it became more convenient for buyers to find out products or services and place their orders quickly.

People started relying on search engine results as big players like Google entered into the fray providing high quality results. Search engines became the biggest platform for meeting potential buyers and sellers.

In the next page I have put some lights into How a website is shown up in Search Results

Now again people tend to visit only few sites found on top of search results (Top 3 I may say) as within this they mostly settle down within those as it will be satisfying their need.

The objective of SEO is to get a website ranking for the search query related to it and thus providing visitor traffic to it.

Being an Internet marketing professional I felt that I should scribble down what I came across in SEO so that people who are very new to SEO can be benefitted.

In the SEO Tutorial table of Contents , I will be placing links for more information related to SEO. Keep reading.

I am a Mechanical Engineering Graduate who started the IT career as an SEO marketer. I have optimised many sites related UK finance industry and own few sites. Currently I am working as a programmer (it was a dream job for me ). Though I am not an SEO by profession now, still I am in good frequency with it as its not a bad choice as a hobby.

I would like to contribute to this SEO world by sharing my knowledge and thoughts through this blog.

One of the hot posts I have done so far is How to use wordpress as CMS , which has brought in few visitors to this blog.. read on..

Happy browsing