Shortening Spiders' path to content

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Shortening Spiders' path to content

Where can i post some code for suggestions in this regard?

Cam_Morton

3:50 pm on May 5, 2003 (gmt 0)

First, I should tell you that I am not the developer for the site in question but the SEO/Content kindaguy.
My knowledge of html is appallingly thin. But when I look at the source code for our webpage I have the feeling that there is a lot of code which -- while performing necessary functions -- could be done another way in order to make it easier for the search spiders to find our content. Not wishing to look and sound like a total fool, I wonder if there is somewhere within webmasterworld (or elsewhere) that I could post the code for our main page and get comments and suggestions on this particular set of problems?
Thanks, Cam

martinibuster

4:01 pm on May 5, 2003 (gmt 0)

Hi Cam,
The answer to your question is no. Site reviews are not allowed (please read the Terms of Service). Part of the reason you may find WebmasterWorld so enjoyable is that you won't run into dozens of posts asking the same thing that you are. That would be boring and un-enjoyable, and most importantly, it would not be a DISCUSSION. The idea is to encourage a discussion, to encourage the development of ideas.

What I suggest you do is rephrase your question. You have an excellent question and are correct in assuming that there may be extra code in the way of the spiders. We don't need to see your code to discuss it.

I can tell you two commonly employed methods is to take the JavaScript code that is in your head section and create a .js file, then link to it. If your css isn't already done this way, then you should create a .css file and dump all of your css codes in there as well.

Cam_Morton

4:52 pm on May 5, 2003 (gmt 0)

Martinibuster... thanks. My problem (as though I had just one!) is that I'm not sure what I'm reading. For instance, and I hope this is brief enough, does a line of code which includes the phrase ( src+"/js/utils.js"> ) indicate that your javascript suggestion is already implemented? How about ( <link href="/css/global.css" ), does that cover your css suggestion? Going through the lines of code I see references to "frames" AND "tables" and here I was thinking that those two were alternate approaches to layout.
I guess some skoolin' may be in order :>)
Cam

macrost

8:06 pm on May 5, 2003 (gmt 0)

Cam,
A really good html reference that I used a long time ago is www.w3schools.com frames and tables are used for layout, however, I stay away from frames (my personal preference)
:-)
Mac

grahamstewart

11:27 pm on May 5, 2003 (gmt 0)

Tables used to be used in layout and still are by some old skoolers ;). If you use CSS positioning instead then you can have html that looks like..

[pre]
<body>
  <div id="content">
    <p>Your Content goes here.</p>
  </div>
  <div id="navbar">
    <p>Navigation links here.</p>
  </div>
</body>
[/pre]

Minimising the number of tags before the content and giving a better text/code ratio.

If your going to be doing SEO then you really need some skooling in html. Don't worry too much about javascript or css yet, but just make sure they use external files (i.e. <link rel="stylesheet"...> indicates an external CSS stylesheet and <script type="text/javascript" src=".."> indicates an external javascript file).

macrost

5:12 am on May 6, 2003 (gmt 0)

grahamstewart,
text to code ratio? I haven't heard that...(well good reason is that I don't do SEO stuff ;-) What is a good ratio? Could you explain that a little bit to me?
Thanks!
Mac

grahamstewart

5:29 am on May 6, 2003 (gmt 0)

Bretts page size checker [searchengineworld.com] will tell you the Text-to-HTML ratio of your page.

i.e. the amount of actual text content versus the amount of html code.

There is some dispute over what the 'magic' ratio is but its generally agreed that the higher this number the better (but don't avoid using proper valid HTML markup in an attempt to make this ratio higher!)