Web Standards and SEO

[Graft-Creative]

I'd read all the articles on the net about how coding with standards more or less makes your page search engine friendly - I took it with all a pinch of salt really (old and skeptical). However on doing a wee bit of googling for our website (I won't post the URL again for fear of being accused of spamming or whatever: but it's foxhill-bank dot org dot uk).

We are coming third & fourth in google, for some fairly generic search terms:

"wildlife in accrington" for instance, third & fourth out of about 5,980 possible results.

I was just wondering: How much of this success is down to the code, and how much could be down to other factors, bearing in mind we'venot gone out of our way to promote it to search engines, not even listed on any directories yet.

Any thoughts? Anyone had similar experiences?

[]|V|[agnus]

I believe well structured, semantic coding makes a HUGE difference. I've not submitted my site formally to any search engines. None. It's built up page rank based solely on the code and of course having my name out there on blogs, here on the forums, etc. My site comes up high on google for a ridiculous range of random queries. Here are some recent ones just to name a few:

- "capitalism country"
- "the day after tommorow"
- "bugme not"
- "hannity and colmes+john stewart"
- "php+for+query+loop"
- "recent events on nike corporation"

Came up on page one of Google for all of that list except the one about Nike in which I came up on page 2 at time of referral, but page 3 when I checked just now.

I'd also note that all of that content is pulled from a database and all of my blog URLs are currently not "search engine friendly"... :rolleyes:

[hemebond]

Wow Graft, that's some great code you got there. It's even sent to me as application/xhtml+xml. Well done. My only niggle is the use of several h1 elements. Your document loses its heirarchy doing that. Google may also penalise you for it (I heard that it interprets heading elements as important).

One thing that may help your Google rank, is to hace incoming links from similar sites.

[Graft-Creative]

Thanks hemebond. Yep that is some great code we have there, mostly thanks to Glen, who was responsible for the entire backend system, and a lot of front end stuff too, and for the serving up of xhtml 1.1 as application/xml.

Is it just me being dumb, or are headers a bit tricky to get your 'head' round? Particularly when your page is DIVed up into different sections. I can see what you mean,when I look at the site with stylesheet turned off, but then again I struggle to find many parallels in traditional media (like books). This is going a bit off topic I suppose, but it's my topic so who gives a hey :)

How would this convert to xhtml: front cover title/contents header/contents (<ol> I suppose?)/ chapter title/ etc etc.

any recommended reading on the subject?

If it's important to search engines, I need to know?