Clean Up Your Web Pages to Improve Google Rankings

WYSIWYG  (What You See Is What You Get) webpage editors, such as FrontPage and Dreamweaver, create a huge amount of unnecessary HTML code. Every time you update your website, more clutter and unnecessary code is added to your web pages. This unnecessary junk may make it harder for search engine spiders to index your website and your pages may load more slowly. Cluttered web pages may hurt your website’s ranking in Google. Or they may not.

I have read suggestions that a lot of clutter and unnecessary code can hurt Google rankings. I have also read that as long as your website looks fine in a browser, search engine spiders can index it. However, page load time does seem to be factor that Google takes into account when determining website rankings. It is better to err on the side of caution and keep your website code as clean as possible.

Go to your browser menu and select View and then select Source. This will show you the source code of your website. If there are a lot of HTML tags around your content, that can be a problem. Clutter consists of unnecessary tags and empty tags. Here is an example of cluttered HTML code:

<div id="e30" style="position:absolute;left:1;top:600;width:507;height:45;"><span class="text"><font face="Bookman Old Style" color="#FFFFFF" size="4"><span style="font-size:18px;line-height:22px;">Located in Temecula, Ca.<br soft></span></font></span> </div>

<div id="e31" style="position:absolute;left:613;top:60;width:112;height:45;"><span class="text"><i><font face="Bookman Old Style" color="#000000" size="4"><span style="font-size:18px;line-height:22px;">Temecula, Ca</span></font></i><font face="Bookman Old Style" color="#000000" size="3"><span style="font-size:16px;line-height:20px;">.<br soft></span></font></span> </div>

The only content in this example conists of Located in Temecula, Ca. and Temecula, Ca. There is far more code here than actual content.

The best way to keep your website clean is to learn how to update your content using a text editor. With a text editor, you only change the actual content. You aren’t having any effect on the actual surrounding code. You can open html pages in a text editor like Notepad. You will also need an FTP program to transfer files between your computer and your web hosting. You will easily find free FTP software online. FileZilla is one excellent free option.

If you don’t already have one, you should use an external CSS style sheet. A style sheet will hold all of your styling code, such as fonts, colors, sizes, borders and heading styles. They will reduce the amount of code on your web pages and the loading time.

As an example, if you want to specify that all headings on your website have a certain style, you can put that style into your external style sheet. Here is an example:

h1 {font-size:1.1em; font-family: verdana, arial; margin-top: 5px; margin-left: 3px; padding: 2px; color: #3F3F3F;}

Now, all you need to do to put a heading on your web pages is this:

<h1>About Me</h1>

This significantly reduces the amount of tags that are around the content, so you will have faster loading pages.