posted at 13:13:41
By Flipping Heck!

Posted In
Blogging

As I've researched this article I've realised how guilty I have personally been of some of the points that follow so I've taken some of my own advice and it's amazing how much better the site is performing in searches just with a few minor changes (such as linking titles through and avoiding "click here" links). So here are a few of my tips for making your blog search engine friendly and not only that, they'll help your visitors experience as well.

1. Avoid the use of nested tables.

Unlike a human, spiders navigate round your site via the code if you have table within table, within table this is a lot of extra code that the spider has to cut through in order to actually get to your content.

The old version of my site (http://www.katywhitton.com/blogold) used nested tables for layout which looks nice but is a nightmare for the spider to parse. The newest version of the site (http://www.flippingheck.com) uses pure CSS for the main layout. There are a couple of small tables dotted around for various reasons but these are only one layer deep so are easily read by the spiders.

2. Validate your code

If your code contains errors, this could make the spider throw a bit of a wobbly, it may even stop parsing your page altogether. Not only that (and more importantly) it may not load properly on your visitors browser. Check that the site works in Inter....

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