Yet another SEO question related to HTML

[mysticwater]

Hi,
I know how annoying these SEO questions can get, but I was hoping someone could quickly answer mine <link removed>:

1)Is a certain way of coding using HTML better in terms of SEO?

2) What exactly is the difference btw XHTML and HTML? is one better than the other in terms of SEO?

3) Online tools say that my site: http://www.rblog.net16.net/
is NOT indexed. But when I type in the URL it appears on google, even though its not the first entry, even though the search should produce one unique result....
Is there a reason this occurs?

4)It appears the google robots have not crawled the site in ages since I have changed the description and title meta tags. I just wanted to confirm (as I have seen this question in another forum) that I DO NOT have to submit my site to google after I have edited the meta tags?

[londres9b]

1)Is a certain way of coding using HTML better in terms of SEO?

I'm not an expert on that but I guess not really. Except some things:
> Having unique, accurate page titles
> Using the meta tags description and keywords. Make sure the description is related to the actual page content and not general across all site.
> Using alt tags on images

2) What exactly is the difference btw XHTML and HTML? is one better than the other in terms of SEO?

XHTML is a "cleaner, stricter" version of HTML. (W3Schools)
It has these differences:
> All code (tags,..) must be in lowercase
> All elements must be closed and properly nested
> check the w3schools tutorial on XHTML

No, I think not. If your code has no errors or so it doesn't matter if it's HTML or XHTML.

3) Online tools say that my site: http://www.rblog.net16.net/
is NOT indexed. But when I type in the URL it appears on google, even though its not the first entry, even though the search should produce one unique result....
Is there a reason this occurs?

I've searched for your site and I couldn't find it.. :(
Yap, sorry, I found it on Google.. I don't know what's going on with your site. Try to use webmaster tools.
I recommend you submit your site to Bing (and Google.)If you don't yet use Google Webmaster tools, I recommend using it.

4)It appears the google robots have not crawled the site in ages since I have changed the description and title meta tags. I just wanted to confirm (as I have seen this question in another forum) that I DO NOT have to submit my site to google after I have edited the meta tags?

That doesn't make sense.. Of course you don't. Google will comeback to your site regularly.
Make use of the Google Webmaster tools to see what's going on with your site.

hope I helped. :)

[drhowarddrfine]

1) Yes and no. A book is easier to read if you use chapters, title and paragraphs. A web page is easier for search engines if you structure it the same.

2) XHTML is HTML reformulated using XML. It was developed for those who use XML data. But most people don't serve XHTML as XHTML and the browser interprets it as broken HTML anyway ("tag soup"). So anyone who claims XHTML is better than HTML in any way doesn't understand all the technicals behind that.

Neither is better or worse for SEO because the engines look for tags.

[Johnsei]

Did you ever give a thought about semantic html? If your html is semantically correct, then yes, your html is good for SEO. That means appropriately using <h> tag, understanding the between <b>and<strong>tags. There are quite lot of such subtle difference between semantically sound html and bad html.

[Bryan Cheung]

Use the right doctype then it doesn't matter if you use HTML or XHTML. The doctype is very very important for search engines because that is how they know best if they are reading html or xhtml(so does the browser!).

And Johnsei mentioned it but semantic html is also pretty important for search engines. Use header-tags for headers, paragraph-tags for paragraphs and tables for tabulair data(and not structuur!), divisions on websites are made with the div-tag.

B.

[drhowarddrfine]

No, the doctype means nothing to search engines. Nor do they care whether you use HTML or XHTML. They view the structure and content of the page only. While XHTML does allow custom tags and attributes, search engines will ignore those since they are undefined for the most part.

[Bryan Cheung]

Search engines doesn't look at doctype anymore? they used to?

But how do they recognise the structure then?

[drhowarddrfine]

Search engines never looked at doctype. The structure is never different because of that. <h1> is <h1> no matter what doctype you use.

[Bryan Cheung]

But how do you know where the title stops, or does your title dont stop?

[drhowarddrfine]

In xhtml, title ends with an end tag. In html, it ends at the next left arrow bracket.

[Death Slaught]

@drhowarddrfine
So you're saying that XHTML shouldn't be used in place of HTML, let's say, just because the syntax is cleaner?

[drhowarddrfine]

No. I'm saying it doesn't matter. Besides, most people don't serve XHTML as XHTML and only as HTML.

[Death Slaught]

Ah okay, I always XHTML Strict because the code is cleaner and forced ending tags. I don't use XML, but as long as it doesn't really matter, I don't care.

[Bryan Cheung]

@drhowarddrfine, just trying to make it clear to myself:

<h1>This is a <strong>title</strong>

So in this example the title stops at "title"?

[drhowarddrfine]

I don't know what point I was trying to make cause that doesn't make sense. Where an element starts or ends is the same in both html and xhtml in most cases. xhtml always requires an end tag while html does not in all cases but it doesn't matter to search engines.

You guys need to read through Henri Sivonen's explanation of doctypes to get a better feel for this, especially the part on parsing.

[Bryan Cheung]

@drhowarddrfine
"In html, it ends at the next left arrow bracket."
My example derived from this quote. Thats why I was trying to make it clear to myself because that would idd make no sense ;)

Gonna read the article, thanks.

[Death Slaught]

Sorry, I was in a hurry and wasn't being very specific. I was trying to ask why using the XHTML doctype for non-xml markup (just HTML) made a difference. I usually prefer it just for the forced ending tags - to me it is cleaner and more structurally sound.

As usual you have the provided the answer ^_^ XHTML with just text/html data, is servered as tag soup with extra slashes. The same parser for HTML is used, and is pointless to use without xml data.


Thanks, Death

[Elyse Summers]

Oh good, finally something I feel reasonably like an expert in!

1)There are certain things to code to make it show up more on a search engine, yes, most of which have all already been mentioned here. Another one you can add are titles on your anchor tags, if you have any, and you should make sure your page validates - webcrawlers/robots aren't as smart as browsers, so they may ignore sections of your text if not nested properly, etc, sometimes.

If you have a lot of scripts running on your page, you should have them saved externally and linked in - spiders often only index the first so many lines of a page, so you want your important content as close to the top as possible.

The text itself is a huge one, and with the growing popularity of social media marketing and linking, arguably the most important. Pages you want indexed should have 250 words + of text, with your keywords mentioned a few times BUT NOT TOO MANY (robots can tell when you're weighting!) for density purposes. The very best thing you can do is have good, understandable copy on your page.

Sometimes, though, what you DON'T do is most important in SEO. Make sure you avoid doing anything the engine might consider cheating or stacking the deck - divs with display:hidden full of keywords, white text on white background, etc.

To be honest, though, while yes, you should obviously optimize for SEO, it's not as important as it once was. Proper social media marketing can be much more effective; as more and more people get their links and new pages from twitter, facebook, digg, etc, a good recommendation from some one with a decent amount of followers can cascade into thousands of hits.

So, in short, I'd code with SEO in mind but don't go too far out of your way unless you're being specifically contracted for SEO on the site and can work a good chunk of billable hours on it. (There are always ways of weighting your page, but spiders and getting smarter and smarter so you have to be sneakier and sneakier.)