Search Engine Optimization (SEO) | PageRank

Checking the List: SEO Details - Getting Technical


Now let’s take a look at the more technical aspects of your web site. What is the code-to-text ratio of the site? At a minimum, you should have more text (content the visitor sees) than code on your site. There are online tools you can use to check this, such as the aptly-named Code to Text Ratio tool on SEO Chat.

What is your page size, and how long does it take to load? If your pages are very big and take a while to load, visitors won’t wait until they finish; they’ll head back to the search engine results they received and click another link. It’s a truism – confirmed with actual studies – that a web surfer won’t wait longer than eight seconds for a page to load. I venture to say that those are the patient ones; you’d best make your pages load even more quickly than that.

Let’s look at your key word density now. Gary advocates keeping the key word density on each page between three and seven percent. Too high and you trigger over optimization flags with the search engines; too low and you risk being judged less relevant for those key words than your competitors – who will then appear higher than you in the SERPs. As with code to text ratios, there are online tools available to help you measure key word density, such as SEO Chat's own Keyword Density tool.

Is your page W3C Compliant? Some have suspected that Google prefers pages that are compliant, but no one has been able to prove it. On the other hand, it’s easy to check; W3C makes its own tool available. And validating helps ensure that your page will appear similarly in all browsers that follow the standard without having to rely on error correction. This means your visitors won’t receive unpleasant surprises.

Is your web site’s content entirely original – or is there duplicate content on the web? This is very important for a couple of reasons. First, as you know, Google penalizes for duplicate content, and it often can’t tell who had any particular piece of content first. Second, copyright laws apply on the web as well, and copyright holders are within their rights to demand that stolen content be taken down. We’ve had to do that any number of times here at Developer Shed. This cuts both ways; we also make sure our writers aren’t infringing someone else’s copyright.

That’s all I could fit into this article. Next week I’ll finish covering the technical aspects you need to focus on, then move on to the other areas that Gary enumerates in his checklist. Expect to see a lot of attention paid to links. I think I’ve given you quite enough to check off until then!