Good SEO often takes a lot of effort, but some of the most important parts of SEO best practices are actually quite simple.

Clean & Simple Code

Making your site validate really isn’t that difficult if you code appropriately. And believe it or not, code that validates is good for SEO. By using semantical markers the way they were meant to be used, search engine spiders will be able to better understand your site, and will then crawl it more efficiently.

But what does this mean, exactly?

First, make sure you have a good webmaster. Don’t use wysiwyg html generators–they never validate. Your webmaster should not only know what validating means, but shold be able to create validated html from scratch.

Second, using semantical markers means to use header tags (<h1>) rather than text that is simply bolded and enlarged. This is fundamentally different from how you might make headers in a word document. It also means to use emphasis and strong tags rather than italics and bold tags.

Third, always link to external files for javascript and css. Remember to try to keep your actual content as the main thing that spiders see when they crawl your page. If they have to wade through lines of javascript and style definitions, it may give up before it even reaches your content.

These three simple rules will help your SEO significantly without requiring too much effort on your part. Remember: clean code is always good.

Posted by Eric Herboso.
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