Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Don’t Bloat Your Pages With Code

Google generally has a time limit that it sets to crawl sites. If you have a large site,
Google may not have time to crawl all pages during the first or second passes. This
problem can be minimized if you keep the code of your web pages lean and clean.

This also makes your pages download faster, which improves the visitor experience.
Studies show that you lose 10% of your visitors for every second it takes your page
to load. After about 5 seconds, you might as well forget it – most people will have left
your site. Remember there is a still a large percentage of people who still use dial-up
modems – particularly outside of the US. This will not change anytime soon, despite
the hype over broadband.

This means try not to have more code than visible content (text) on your page.
Frequently web pages are comprised of 80% or even 90% JavaScript code and style
code (hard-coded font information or inline style blocks). Right-click a web page and
then click View Source – you will be amazed at the amount of code present.
Although Google ignores such code, it still takes time for it to wade through to find
your content.

Put your JavaScript code in a separate (.JS) file and link to it from the
section of each applicable web page, as follows:




In addition, create a stylesheet file (.CSS) file and link to it also.


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