An intertesting article by Stoney deGeyter on smallbusinessnewz raises an interesting question when it comes to duplicate content and web design, title tags and search engine optimization. Many web designers, particularly when working to a limited budget, often create header and footer templates for their clients.

As a time saving practice this is fair enough. If you’re having ten pages created it sounds like good business sense to create templates that can then be filled with the relevant content individually. However, the header and footer can play an important role in search engine optimization programs. The last thing you need is to have your web design fight your efforts along the way.

To quote Stoney:

…I believe the title tag is the single most important piece of real estate on your site, duplication here is likely to have the least effect on the search engine crawlers. It will, however, have an effect on rankings, but that’s another discussion. Even still, it’s a duplicate issue that absolutely must be addressed for tactical SEO performance.

I quite agree on this issue. The more variation in page content the better. There are other issues at play here as well. Each page should be, to all intents and purposes, unique - and that includes the titles and any other meta data. There is a good chance that your web design has identical meta tags including the keywords meta tag. This is not good search engine optimization practice particularly as each page will most likely require a different set of keywords.

If you have pages that are product based, they will require different keywords along with a different title. These can be included in your web design if a little thought is given to your web design planning. Unique pages are standard search engine optimization practices. I wonder how many look at the tags as part of that uniqueness?

Having your web design work for you is half the battle when it comes to search engine optimization. Have you checked yours lately?

Did you know you can convert your HTML to XHTML and allow your website visitors to subscribe to your content with RSS? Maybe you knew that but didn’t know how. Well, it’s really not difficult if you have the right Search Engine Optimization tools.

First, the difference between XHTML and XML …

XML stands for Extensible Markup Language. It does not, like HTML display data on a screen. Rather, it carries data from one place to another. That’s why it is used for RSS feeds. Another difference between XML and HTML is that you have to define your own tags. They are not predefined.

You can’t just convert your HTML documents to XML and be done. You don’t throw away the HTML once the conversion takes place. You still need the HTML so that site visitors can see the data that they are subscribing to. The XML file is used to transport the file to the subscriber once they’ve decided to subscribe. Then they will be able to read it in HTML again in its final destination.

XHTML stands for Extensible Hypertext Markup Language. Unlike XML, it is designed to replace HTML. That means, when you do create your XHTML document, you no longer need the HTML so you can throw it away. It is almost like a hybrid. While it looks like HTML, it is much cleaner than HTML and is also has the properties of an XML file. So your visitors can read the XHTML file in their browser while it sits on your server, just like an HTML page, AND they can subscribe to it and read it in its final destination just like an XML file. XHTML is essentially the equivalent to the latest version of HTML - HTML 4.01.

So the question is, how do you convert your standard HTML documents to XML or XHTML? Well, you need one simple open source software solution and it will do all the work for you. It’s called HTML TIDY. There is a GUI version and a Command Prompt version. I recommend the GUI version as all you have to do is upload your HTML document and TIDY will do the conversion in a second. The Command Prompt version requires a little bit of memorization and finger work. You can download the GUI version of TIDY here.

After you convert your information to XHTML, all you have to do then is provide your visitors with a way to subscribe to your feed that will help drive visitors and Search Engine Optimization. And that’s it. Simple.

Dave Davies wrote an excellent piece in WebProNews about choosing a designer to work with your SEO. I found this gem inside:

But there’s a big upside and that comes when you have the opportunity to work with web designers who know how important SEO is (as an SEO who knows how important a good design is). Working to balance the two can be a daunting task and having the skills of the SEO matched with the skills of the web designer can be a true blessing. For example, I may have a great idea to make a site more easily navigated by search engines but an ugly solution to implement it whereas the designer may have a more attractive solution in mind if they know the problem and the technical solution.

This is a great article and I recommend you read it. In summary, I’d like to offer these tidbits to help you understand what to look for in a web designer before you hire one to work with your optimization team. This list really is a list of items that are necessary to build an optimized web page. Designer or no designer, your web pages need to have these characteristics if you expect them to perform well organically. Can your designer make it happen?

• Code-to-text ratio: Cut the code and increase the text. Good text, not fluff. You don’t want your code outweighing your website content. That would be bad for SEO. The search engine spiders must crawl through all the code to read the content and that won’t fare well if they can’t find the meat. So cut the code and focus on great content.
• Internal Links: Use proper anchor text. You want your internal pages to rank high as well as your index page. Those internal pages will rank higher than your index page in some cases so you want to focus on links that point from specific pages to other specific pages to help make that happen.
• Keyword Usage: There are two errors, generally, that content writers make when they write website copy. The first is not enough keywords, but the other - and this one is more prominent - too many keywords. Nothing is more annoying than reading a website that is stuffed with the keyword in every sentence. It looks like you are trying to write content for the spiders. Don’t! Yes, put keywords in your content, but don’t overdo it. Davies recommends 3% keyword density. Some other SEOs have recommended a range of 2%-5%. In truth, there is no optimal keyword density. I prefer the range because it gives you some flexibility. What determines your keyword density is the amount of content on your web page and the number of times you use your keywords. Bottom line: Just don’t overdo it.

Unless your web designer is writing content, you won’t have to worry about that last one. But you will have to worry about the second two, especially code to content ratio. Make sure your template design isn’t riddled with useless code. Javascript is notorious for using tons of code. Be sure that any superfluous code is put into an external file that you can reference in a single line. If your web designer doesn’t know how to do that then it’s time to get a new designer.