Create an SEO friendly XHTML page
When creating a xhtml page on your website here are some important considerations for search engine optimization. This is a basic rundown or checklist with some of the most important elements for the on site SEO of your page.
Document declaration and headers.
- Declare the document type;
The most common is the Transitional
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”> - Give the document an xmlns attribute and set the page language code.
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” xml:lang=”en” lang=”en”> - Declare the head element of the page
<head> - Define the character set used in the page.
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″ /> - Define the page Title element
<title>Title of the page</title>
The page title should be around 40 to 70 characters in length and be a description of the text content of the page. The title should also include the main key words / phrases that you would like it to be found for in the search engines. It is possible the most important part of the page in terms of SEO value and is what the search engines use as the link through to your site in their search results pages. - Define the page description.
<meta name=”description” content=”detailed description of page” />
The meta description of your page should contain approx 25 words or around 150-200 characters and should be a detailed description of the page content. The meta description has no direct SEO effect but is normally used by the search engines in their results pages as a description of the link through to your site, and so should be an added incentive for a user to click, containing relevant keywords / phrases . - Include external CSS and Javascript files.
<link href=”css/styles.css” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” media=”all” />
<script src=”js/functions.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>
Always keep your CSS and JavaScript functions in external files as this keeps your page code cleaner and easier for the search engines to spider your pages. - Close the head element
</head> - The document Body
<body>
Important XHTML elements of a page.
<h1></h1>
This is the main text header for the page. There should be only 1 <h1> element on a page and like the page title it should be a short description on the page text content.
<h2></h2> / <h3></h3>
Sub heading h1 to h6. Use these to split up your paragraphs with sub headings. You can have numerous h2 to h6 tags on your page.
<p></p>
The paragraph tag, used for the paragraphs of text on your page.
<strong></strong>
Used to bold text. Search engines will put emphasis on any text that is bold on your page. Do not over use this tag but if possible you could bold up your most important keywords.
<em></em>
Used to italicize text. Like the <strong> tag the search engines will put emphasis on text inside this tag.
<a></a>
Used for creating links. The <a href=””> attribute is used for the link and will pass page rank to the page it is linking to unless you add a nofollow attribute, <a href=”pagename” rel=”nofollow”> . When linking out to other sites it can be a good idea to use the nofollow attribute so you can pass all your page rank internally in your site.
<img>
When adding images to your page always include an image ALT attribute along with width and height. eg. <img src=”myimage.gif” width=”100” height=”50” alt=”keyword for image” /> Width, height and the ALT attribute are all required for valid XHTML.
Summary
The text content of your page is obviously very import in how the page will rank, Try to have a minimum of 300 words on the page written grammatically correctly. The text needs to be both engaging and interesting for your user at the same time written so the search engines can spider the page and index your content with ease. Code your pages using external CSS and Javascript and use relevant and semantic XHTML formatting.
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