SEO – Basic Programming Guidelines

1. No HTTP Error:

A web document (HTML or PHP file) should not contain any script error, either on the clientside or on the server side. All web documents should return ‘200 Ok’ server header.

Make sure a web document doesn’t return any HTTP error like :

• URL not found (broken link)

• URL not followed

• URL time out

• URL Unreachable

2. Page Load Time:

A web document should not take more than 5 seconds to complete download on a 56 KBPS

modem

3. W3C Validation:

All web documents must be valid ‘XHTML 1.0 Transitional’ documents and must clear the

W3C Markup Validation Test (http://validator.w3.org/)

All web documents/ CSS files must contain a Valid CSS code and must clear the W3C CSS

Validation Test.

4. Check in different browsers:

All web documents should look good and must be functional on different browsers: Internet

Explorer, Mozilla firefox, Netscape Navigator and Opera etc.

All web documents must be tested on Lynx Text Browser. Make sure that JavaScript,

cookies, session IDs, DHTML or Flash don't keep you from seeing your entire web document

in a text browser. If this guideline is not followed then search engines may have trouble in

crawling the web document.

5. Check Screen Resolutions:

Make sure that your web documents look good on different screen resolutions (esp. 1024 *768 and 800 * 600), fonts and brightness settings.

6. Name of files:

The names of your domain, sub-domain, web documents, folders, image files, CSS files,java script files/functions or any other file must be descriptive. For e.g.

• Folders’ name should be something like this: /pregnancy/baby-names.html. Choosethat name for your folder which clearly specifies what the folder contains. StaticURLs are must. Do not use dynamic URLs.

• If an image displays a ‘Plasma Screen’ then name of the image file must besomething like this: plasma-screen. jpg and not like img34.jpg

• Similarly, we should have file names like keyword.css, keyword.js and descriptivenames for JavaScript functions’ or other functions, which clearly specifies theobjective of the functions.

7. Naming Conventions:

A domain, sub-domain, directory or file name if contains more than one word, should be

separated by a hyphen ‘-‘ and not by underscore ‘_’.

8. Use complete addresses:

Use complete addresses and not relative addresses for all the links to web document, imagefile, java script file, CSS file or any other file. For e.g.

<img src=http://www.abc.com/abc-images/plasma-scree.jpg alt=”Click here to buy Plasma

Screen” /> and not

<img src=”abc-images/plasma-scree.jpg alt=”Click here to buy Plasma Screen” />

<a href=http://www.abc.com/about-us.html”>about us</a> and not

<a href=”about-us.html”>about us</a>

<script language='javascript' src='http://www.abc.com/includes/jscript.js ‘></script> and

not

<script language='javascript' src='includes/jscript.js'></script>

<link href="http://www.abc.com/style/style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"> and not

<link href="style/style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">

9. Internal Search Engine:

Use internal search engines for big websites. This will facilitate navigation of the website.