Best Design Code for Search Engine Optimization? (SEO) 2018

HTML Is The Best Code For SEO

HTML is king when it comes to search engine optimization. The majority of websites on the Internet are HTML sites. Lately, there are more PHP sites showing up but PHP, by nature, is not SEO friendly. Java scripts and Flash may look good and can really jazz up a website, but they are totally ignored by the search engine spiders. The use of "iframes" is another practice that confuses the search engines. It makes it hard for them to analyse the websites link structure.

The truth of the matter is that the less code you use, the more search engine friendly your website will be.

Code tags get in the way of the search engine spiders and make their job more difficult. Despite this fact, proper use of HTML tags can actually improve your search engine ranking. You want to limit your use of tables and try to incorporate CSS (cascading style sheets) when ever possible. This will put a lot of the information for your sites "window dressing" at the top of the page and out of the tags. It will also remove a lot of unnecessary code for fonts and font properties. You want your HTML to be light and clean.

The Problem With PHP

PHP is an awesome time saving tool for webmasters. It creates dynamic web pages that let you make "global" changes by altering just one file. This gives you incredible flexibility and lets you create some very nice web sites. The problem is that PHP is not search engine friendly.

HTML is browser based and creates "static" pages. Your web browser reads the file and converts it into what you see. PHP is server based and creates "dynamic" pages. The information that is presented is contained on the server. The PHP code tells the browser to "get" information from the server which is normally contained in a data base. (most likely MYSQL)

This is where the problems start to occur. The process adds "get" variables and session id numbers to the url's. The search engine spiders don't like this and sometimes you have different url's with the same content. This creates confusion for the spiders and they may skip over pages and not index them at all.

I am not a PHP programmer but I am teaching myself a little PHP because I have a safelist script that I use and I want to be able to make changes on my own without paying a programmer. I know that there are ways around these SEO problems but they are much more involved than SEO with HTML and I am not the person to explain them.

If terms like "htaccess", "parsing ", "loop code", and "trans_sid", leave you with a blank glazed over stare, it is best to leave SEO for PHP to the experts. If you want to find out how to optimize your HTML for the search engines then keep on reading.