Search Engine Optimisation FAQs

Our Answers To Commonly Asked Questions About SEO

Does Search Engine Optimisation change the appearance of a website?

A key aspect of any SEO project is the improvement of the website’s structure and coding, so that search engine spiders can index content fully and frequently. In most cases, making changes to the site’s underlying mark-up will enhance performance without changing its appearance. It is an ideal opportunity, however, to improve elements of design or layout currently impacting on the site’s usability.

Search engine spiders do not ‘see’ websites. They parse HTML code, extracting information on website content while ignoring HTML tags used for the purpose of presentation. This is well-illustrated by websites built using externally referenced Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which separate a page’s HTML mark-up from its styling. A search engine spider will fully index the website’s pages without referencing CSS files, which only control the site’s layout. Replacing table layouts with CSS positioning is an important SEO technique. It makes it easier for spiders to index the resulting cleaner code and it allows content to be presented in a different order in the source code than it is rendered in the browser.

The emergent of HTM5 and CSS3 standards offer ever greater control over appearance, including curved borders, drop shadows and 3-D animations, without the need for proprietary technologies such as flash or complex background image manipulation. HTML5 also includes structural elements with inherent semantic associations for navigation, header, footer, asides and the main page content, heralding cleaner, faster websites which are standards compliant and easier to optimise.

Optillion will sometimes recommend coding or structural changes which will alter the website’s appearance. This is usually because elements like Flash animation or fly out Javascript menus cannot be rendered with an alternative SEO compatible technique. In such cases, the implications of retaining or replacing these features will be discussed in detail with the client before any action is taken.