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Document
Architecture
Having a good handle on html, cascading
style sheets and some scripting is going to be an advantage.
If you build your web pages using authoring software
such as Macromedia's Dreamweaver, it's likely you will
end up with pretty good html formatted documents that
are clean and free of junk coding. But some inferior
applications available can leave your pages with as
much as 50% more code than you really need.
The two main objectives when creating
a web page are optimised load time (the speed of which
the page loads in the browser) and well positioned text
and navigation elements.
Load Time
Bringing down the load time can be
achieved in several ways. First and most obvious is
to make image files sizes as small as possible without
loosing quality. There are a number of tools available
for this (see resources). A good rule of thumb is no
more than 40k total in images for each page, although
after a couple of loads the images will be cached in
the users temporary internet files.
Be sure to add alt tags to your images
with descriptive target keyphrases related to whats
on the page if you can. This will add more weight to
your page and alt tags on image links will encourage
robots to follow the links to other pages.
Another thing you can do is clear
any unnecessary coding from your pages. Minimise the
amount of html you need and drop javascript functions
into external files.
Text and Navigation
Navigation should be simple and contrary
to popular belief its ok to place navigation on any
part of your page; left or right, top or bottom make
no difference. But you should try to include simple
text links as well as button images or Flash or dynamic
menus.
If possible, it's wise to include
links to the root index page and other important sections
of your site on every page. You want to give robots
every chance of following links to spider every part
of your website.
Use H1 heading tags if possible, else you could try using
H2 or perhaps apply css to reduce the size if H1/H2 headings appear too ugly.
Bold or Strong tags used as sub headings are also effective and are known to have
a positive effect on text links if used correctly.
The idea really is to keep pages simple.
Don't get over ambitious with coding, and make all your
links easy to follow for visitors and robots alike.
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