If you have an established site before you approach search engine optimisation, you have a lot of assets on hand. Some things are easier when starting fresh when it comes to SEO, but an established site has an established reputation and a valuable history on the net. One of the difficulties older sites face, however, is mess.

Websites are worse than a kitchen drawer for accumulating mess! As new designers come on board, old code often gets half-treated or just forgotten. Things get done in a rush, and crumbly code piles up. An overhaul might occasionally sweep the old files out, but there is always one or two spots missed.

Clean code is a basic thing you can do to improve your site’s relationship with the search engines. Imagine how a spider feels crawling through that messy kitchen drawer that every house has. There are all sorts of places it can go, and so many things it will never see. The spider is not obliged to trawl through the entire drawer before it leaves, nor will it. It will take the path most obvious to it and move on to the next kitchen.

Search engine spiders, like their wriggly real-life counterparts, won’t intuit which path to walk on a messy site. They’ll go whichever way is easiest, trying not to trip up on the way. A site with clean code is the equivalent of a tidy drawer, with easy, well-defined paths for the search engine spiders to tread. A smart search engine optimisation plan will ensure that no matter which way a search engine spider crawls across the site, it will see what you want it to see.

Your HTML code needs to be clean and light. Clean code is essential in directing web crawlers exactly where you want them to go. Light code is a part of the general clean-up concept, but it also makes crawling more efficient. After all, a drawer can be quite tidy, but still present lots of obstacles to crawl across. Lightweight code also makes download times swifter, meaning there’s less chance of turning users away with a slow site.

A web page is HTML code and the assets referenced by the code. These assets are things such as Flash files, images and other media. Not only does the HTML need to be as clean as possible, the things it carries such as these assets need to be clean and light as well. Simple things such as re-sizing image files before uploading can make a big difference

Some reconfiguring may be needed when you spring clean your site. Your code may need rewrites, and you can talk to our experts at SEO Consult about writing search engine-friendly code. Some assets may benefit from conversion into a more efficient format, or compression. Making fewer HTTP requests is another good way to boost your site’s optimisation and can be one of the most beneficial things to do as a part of a site ‘clean up’.

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