- The Connection Between Web Standards and Findability
- Expressing Meaning Through Semantic Markup
- Accessible Content Is Findable Content
- Clearing Search Engine Roadblocks with Progressive Enhancement
- Decreasing Code to Speed Up Indexing
- Making Content Re-Discoverable with Microformats
- Web Standards Make Content Findable
Decreasing Code to Speed Up Indexing
Search engine spiders are charged with the very difficult task of indexing all content on the Web. The more verbose your code is with presentation markup, which doesn’t clarify the information hierarchy of your content, the longer it will take spiders to crawl your site. Web standards promote the separation of presentation from structure and content. Handling all of your presentation with external style sheets makes it easier for spiders to crawl just the content and your semantic HTML, resulting in faster and more thorough indexing.
Standards also promote the separation of JavaScript behavior into external files. As mentioned earlier, JavaScript can’t be parsed by search engine spiders, and just slows indexing if the JavaScript is mixed into your HTML. Keep it all separate to make it easier to maintain, and faster for search engines to index.