Good code is essential for the success of your SEO campaign. Code is meant to make your website more functional for users and in many cases, they are meaningless for search engine bots. In fact, it is better for bots if you remove all codes and images from your website, but this won’t be acceptable for any Internet audience today. Code can make your website usable, functional and become visually appealing. In fact, your website has failed the simplicity test, if it is no longer functional and navigable after you remove all the codes and leave only simple HTML text. Good code makes things easier for users, but it should obstruct search engine bots. In order to make your code usage more efficient, you need to use the less-is-more principle.
Some webmasters thing that they can use meta robot tags to tell bots to index their pages more easily. But it is better to let robots do their works naturally and make sure that we don’t obstruct them. We need to eliminate tags the serve no or minimal purposes. Many HTML tags can be moved to a separate CSS file. As an example, you may remove font type and size tags from the HTML code and move them to CSS file. By offloading your codes to a separate file, each of your HTML file will become simpler and easier to manage. Troubleshooting will become a much easier task, because you will be able to spot mistakes easily in separate code files, instead of checking codes in each HTML page. Following SEO best practice actually makes your life much easier.
One problem is how to create codes that work properly? There are many JavaScript and CSS code samples that you can find in the Internet. You should get them from trusted websites, so you can be sure that these codes will work. A proper code should be highly configurable and you may change them based on your specific needs and requirements. Again, you should use code only when you need them. In many cases, you use excess code to make your website appears very appealing, but in the end, users don’t really care about them. This can become a bad implementation, if these excess codes actually make your website slower and less responsive to queries. Naturally, your website will grow and there will be more code used in your website.
New pages and sections will be added to your website, so things can become quite complicated if you embed too much code in each page. So, it is important from the start to use separate CSS and JavaScript code files that can be called and used by all HTML pages. With good coding practice, you will be able to fix, make changes and improve your code. It won’t be necessary to change codes in all pages manually, which can be time consuming and tedious. Your pages will load much faster and easier to index.