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The client has now commissioned a SEO company and they have basically turned round and said that all of my code needs to be changed in order to optimise it.
I am pretty upset by this and really can't believe this is the case. How can this be right.
The sample page I just looked at (not live as yet) is all tables/nested tables with inline styling, etc, etc. All I can see at this stage is that the site has been redeveloped using tables -
How can semantically correct code in XHTML be worse then tables everywhere.
I have tried to contact the SEO company but they don't return me calls.
The client is now questioning my abilities as a Web Developer because the SEO have to alter everything. I would like to find out more about the use of SEO with XHTML/CSS so that I can at least understand why this is happening.
Thanks
Why it's happening is probably your markup and css is unfamiliar to those at the SEO firm. Old habits die hard.
You've provided your client with future forward code - it's being edited to a version that will one day need to be revised and that will cost your client $ down the road.
The client is now questioning my abilities as a Web Developer because the SEO have to alter everything. I would like to find out more about the use of SEO with XHTML/CSS so that I can at least understand why this is happening.
Why? Probably because the SEO/SEM that was hired did not understand your method/level of coding. They had to switch back to what they can do which looks like nested tables and all the other stuff that you worked so hard to clean up.
Have the client run that new page developed by them through a validator. Does it validate? Explain to the client that the spider needs to wade through all of that html markup to get to the real content.
The SEO/SEM that was hired did not have to change from your coding to their coding. All they had to do was go in and make their content modifications where necessary. What it seems like they've done is taken the client a step backwards in coding standards. This could also have an effect on how well that site will perform in the future.
As content to code ratio is a factor in SEO, perhaps you could show the client a comparison of this ratio, comparing, say, your version of the homepage to the SEO's "massive step backwards" version?
[searchengineworld.com...]
You could also show the client the difference in download times. And maybe direct them to this thread... ;)
<tr><td style="background: #FFFFFF"><IMG SRC="images/x.gif" WIDTH="1" HEIGHT="1" BORDER="0" ALT=""></td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="lighting.html" class="leftmenu">Lighting</a></td></tr>
Is better then this -
<li><a href="lighting.php" title="Our range of lighting and lighting accessories" >Lighting</a></li>
Just a quick example - I may be jumping the gun but this is from a test page that I found on the server. What I don't want to do is leave it to late to so as the client is committed. I am also curious myself.
Your example is more semantically correct as most navigation links qualify to be within a list element of some sort, normally <ul> but, there are others.
They are also increasing the text to hmtl ratio as mentioned above. I would rather have the clean semantic version than the nested table version. ;)
Would the first example of code not effect the way a page is viewed by a search engine then, I was under the impression that additional code would hinder a search engine from finding the more relevant content.
if for example there were 10 links as above all with the duplicate - background, height, width elements inline for each link wouldn't this be harmful.
The list that i created was/is an unordered list that is styled with CSS. Would having the title tag help also?
