Quick, what’s the difference between these two lines;

What You See Is Not Always What You Get!

What You See Is Not Always What You Get!

Depending on your browser and personal settings, you may have noticed a size difference or perhaps the fonts are different. Regardless, the odds are you missed one of the most important differences, the fact that the first line has meaning and the second does not … well at least to a search engine.

The difference is in the programming or, more accurately, the markup. Whatever you want to call it, the underlying HTML code that is used to make this page can have a significant impact on how a search engine indexes the page, and therefore how well your page performs in the search engines.

The first line used an <h3> tag, telling the search engine this is a header, that it has important meaning pertaining to the content of the page. Here’s the actual underlying HTML:

<h3>What You See Is Not Always What You Get!</h3>

The second line, although it appears important visually, has no special meaning to a search engine. Here’s the underlying HTML code :

<p><strong><span style="font-size: 1.4em;">What You See Is Not Always What You Get!</span></strong></p>

So what does this mean in the end? It means that what you see is not always what you get. Two identical looking pages created by two different people can have significantly different results with search engines. When a search engine indexes a page it crawls through the underlying HTML code for the page and uses special markup tags, such as the <h3> tag, to try and deduce meaning and the relevance of certain words and phrases on the page. The <h3> tag has semantic meaning for the search engine. Search engines plug this information into their page ranking equations which are used to determine the page’s rank. The page that was styled with font-size selection (the second example above) provides no additional semantic meaning for the search engine and is therefore a miss opportunity providing little or no impact on it’s ranking in the search engine.

The example above, with the <h3> tag, is a very simple example with only one of the many HTML tags used to create web pages. A very common problem in the web design industry centers around the lack of understanding of the importance of the web page’s underlying HTML code. There are many WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) tools used by designers that allow them to create great looking pages without having to understand how HTML works because the tool produces the HTML for them. The problem, as many companies are finding out the hard way, is that these tools do not always produce search engine friendly HTML code. I’m not suggesting that these tools can’t do this to some degree, but the tool will likely miss many opportunities for optimization and is therefore no substitute for a solid understanding of HTML and the way search engines interpret it.

Ensuring good search engine practices are being followed during initial development will always be more cost effective than trying to fix the problem after the website has been launched and no one shows up to view it.