Online marketing starts with your website

Internet marketing allows you to reach a global audience. Internet marketing is marketing your business online. Online marketing starts with your website; make sure its attractive and easy to use. When they need information, modern-day consumers turn first to the Internet. All of your online marketing will make sure they will find

For a lot of my clients, older sites that were once high ranking, have disappeared off the radar. They chalk it up to more competition and lax SEO upkeep, but oftentimes, the websites themselves are the culprit. I found a relationship between older coding methods and the breakdown between title/url/header content and actual body content. I wanted to take a few minutes to address some issues with older sites and how obsolete code may be hurting their rankings.

Tables

5-15 years ago, if text, data and graphics had to be aligned in anyway, most people were using tables. They're still using them, and as search engines become more sophisticated, they are starting to read all of the table code as content, and this is shooting websites down by the hundreds.

A client of mine brought me a website that was created about five years ago, and sure enough, it was riddled with tables and all the set up code required to facilitate them. The code to content ratio was 34k to 3k. A keyword density check revealed that six of the top ten keywords were actually from the table code. Ouch.

The website in question had been tanking in the rankings for sometime, and this was my chief concern. With the development of CSS and PHP, it isn't necessary to clutter up a page with formatting on the page itself. His problem was solved by overhauling the website with a new design (at his request) and all of the layouts and navigation were organized using CSS and PHP to get the same visual results without making the code such a mess and making a nightmare of the SEO.

ASCII and HTML Codes

Tricky symbols oftentimes make it necessary to insert ASCII or preferably HTML codes into a web page in place of an alphanumeric character. Unfortunately, much like the code from tables, ASCII and HTML code get read literally by spiders and can artificially affect the best keywords on the page.

The most common culprit is . Commonly entered multiple times on a page where a trademarked product is mentioned for keyword emphasis, this symbol (either or ) is also read by spiders and added to the list of keywords along with everything else. As a result, it's raised as often as the product name itself and complicates keyword efficiency where better keywords should be, at the top. It turns out that the symbol is easily viewable when copied from another source, like MS Word, and pasted into the page source. It works for both Microsoft's Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox.

Websites today should be more streamlined, easier to edit and easier to market through SEO. If yours isn't, then you're due for a code overhaul before you seek out an SEO professional.

Joe Flitner has provided consulting and implementation to client websites since 1998. In 2007, he created JHF SEO to offer his own brand of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Content Development services.