Under the bonnet search engine marketing

Have you ever had a look under the bonnet of your website to see what's wrong? Just like when something goes wrong with your car, the first place to look is under the hood. The symptoms however, are not leaking oil or hot gas, but search engine results. if you are coming absolutely nowhere in the search engine results pages, then look at your source code, because the chances are that there are things in there that need fixing before you even think about stepping on the gas with your link building.

To give you an example, we were recently presented with a website (a whitelabel project, so I can't give too much away), where the initial code looked like this pretty much all the way through:

Bad HTML

Click on the image for a better view

Now if you can't read a single word in here, then neither can a search engine spider. This is an extreme example of html code and content that has absolutely no raw potential for search engine optimisation and which must rely soley on link building.

Now lets have a look at the code when our web guys got their hands on it to re-create what is essentially the same website with a few aesthetic improvements:

Good HTML

Click on the image for a better view

What we see here is a web page with no onsite optimisation work done on it yet, but with oodles of raw potential, simply because the search engines can work their way through whole paragraphs and lists of text without being interupted or wrong-footed by mountains of extraneous HTML code.

As a general rule of thumb, the easier the source code is for you as a non-technical person to read, the easier it is for a search engine to understand. Words are the biggest asset of any search engine marketing campaign from whatever perspective you look at it, so you can't afford to hide them.