SEO Tip – Get rid of Code Bloat
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
I posted this tip way back, but I keep coming across it so it’s important to bring it up again.
Get rid of “code bloat”. What is code bloat? Code bloat is code that is unnecessarily long, slow, or otherwise a waste of resources.
Move JavaScript and CSS to external files. I ran SEOMoz’s term extractor tool on a new client’s site last night and almost 1/3 of the terms they pulled from the page was code. This is code which should have been in a CSS file instead of in the head content of the page. I’m butting heads with this client’s designer with their sloppy code and URLs.
Oh, which reminds me -
BONUS SEO Tip – you cannot leave spaces in URL file names. You should separate words with dashes/hyphens. You can use underscores if you want the searcher to find that exact phrase (i.e. seo_tip). If you use dashes/hyphens to separate the words the search engine will split the search results, so using the SEO Tip example, seo-tip may return results for searches for seo or tip and seo_tip would only be returned for a search for seo tip.
Remember, anything that pushes keyword-containing text further down on the page could be negatively affecting your rankings.
