Webmasters are being reminded not to forget the basic principles of search engine optimization (SEO).
According to Ann Smarty, writing in the Search Engine Journal, simple ideas such as source ordered content (SOC) – putting the most relevant information at the top of the page – and arranging page code effectively through CSS.
She commented that SOC can allow designers to give prominence to keyword-heavy sections of the website and enable spiders to see items such as articles before sideways navigation menus.
Putting rich content towards the top of a webpage also means that crawlable sections of text can be placed above sections such as flash which will be ignored by search engines.
Webcredible has claimed that Juicy Studio experienced a six-fold increase in the number of hits to its websites after changing their coding systems to CSS – a "cleaner" system of writing a page.
The information service also reports that CSS results in a higher ratio of content to coding – something which makes a website more appealing to search engine spiders.
