As competition for search engine rankings increases and more and more websites see the light of day, search engine optimisation has become more important than ever in the last few years.  Many business owners rely on organic traffic (traffic based on search engine positions) to generate traffic which in turn has the potential to turn into customers.  But whilst doing your utmost to optimise your content and build links to your site have you ever stopped to think about whether your HTML code is optimised?

Optimised HTML Code

Unless you personally designed your website from scratch it is highly likely that you have never seen the code behind your website.  Whether you use a theme or paid someone to design your website for you, you have placed all of your trust in them to ensure your HTML coding is optimised to a good standard.  Unfortunately many web designers do not optimise HTML code as they tend to focus on the visual and functional aspects of the website instead which obviously also needs doing.  However it can severely hamper your SEO efforts if your textual content is bogged down by excessive structural code.

Why is Optimised HTML So Important?

Regardless of any efforts you have made to improve your search engine rankings, if your HTML code is not optimised correctly, your site will not receive a good page rank position.  In order to rank your website effectively the Google Spiders need to effectively crawl your page to find out what your page content is about so that they can then index it.  Websites that are full of un-necessary coding can stop the search engine spiders from doing their job correctly as the more code that is at the top of a page the less importance a search engine spider will place on the content below it.

Think Of Your Readers Too

Have you found that your website consumes a lot of bandwidth?  Or maybe you’ve just discovered your customers are complaining about how slow your website loads?  Both of these things can also be due to un-optimised HTML code.  If you’ve noticed a high bounce rate on your site you may want to check your page loading time and see whether this could have anything to do with it.  Most visitors won’t wait around for a website to load so instead of visiting your website they will visit that of a competitor.  Luckily though, if your slow website loading speed is down to your HTML coding you can do something about it.

Check Your Code

If you think the HTML code on your website may be un-optimised the first thing you’ll need to do is check it.  You can use the Pingler HTML optimizer tool to do this.  Simply enter your website’s HTML coding and the tool will attempt to optimise it as best as possible.  Alternatively you could follow HTML optimisation tutorials online or hire a website designer who is skilled in HTML optimisation to do the hard work for you.