We talk a lot in onsite optimisation about the code to content ratio. The advent of CSS has meant that any code associated with styling the way the website looks, from the size of your font and headers to how the actual site is laid out, can be removed from the web page itself and held in a separate file. This has led increasingly to a belief that less code and more content on a web page will lead to better search engine rankings.

The reliance is therefore on the web developer to produce an optimised site - one that makes best use of CSS to remove inline styles from the web page etc. But, the job is half that of the developers - there is a huge responsibility of the website content manager too. A responsibility it would seem to me they are often unaware of.

Most of the sites I have seen in recent times are built on content management servers - it is pretty much the norm these days for good websites. But what this means is that the content managers enter their own content. No problem most are usually trained by their search engine marketing companies (or suss it out through their own research) on the importance of the keywords in the content etc. But what I have discovered recently is that very few have any regard for the tidiness of their content as code. Such examples that continually pop-up are the use of a break tag <br /> within a heading tag say <h1> - this serves no purpose, but to add code to the content without changing the look and feel. Similarly, a break before a closing paragraph tag - same effect, nothing! And the other one that is really painful is the excessive use of a non-breaking space ( ). Sometimes, they are necessary (such when adding paragraph for line spacing to make a particular page work in the content manager - but often they are not - and they only serve to increase the code to content ratio.

A little hint to avoid too many non-breaking spaces in your content: two spaces after a full stop in print documents; only one space after a full stop in web documents.

Much of this happens because content is copied and pasted either straight from one web page to another or directly from Microsoft Word. I advise all my clients when entering content that if they are not writing it from scratch straight into the content management servers themselves then paste the text into notepad first and convert the format it as plain text - which strips any formatting, before pasting it in.

Tags: SEO

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 6th, 2007 at 9:50 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.