HTML Cleanup

Back in the good ole days, when the Internet was first populating, you had to be able to write HTML code if you wanted to publish anything online. Luckily, this is no longer the case. High end HTML editors such as Macromedia Dreamweaver or Microsoft Frontpage allow us to create the web page we want, and covert it to HTML for us. However, this often leads to sloppy and unorganized code.

HTML is short for Hypertext Markup Language, and is the dominant language for the creation of web pages. As search engine algorithms continue to evolve and improve, the cleanliness of your HTML code becomes more and more important, and soon pages with sloppy tags and coding errors will be recognized as less authoritative than pages with clean and tidy HTML code.

Now while several tech companies have released software that claims to clean up your HTML code for you, it is always best to have a real person with knowledge of the language go through your site and get rid of any unneeded HTML tags that may be detrimental to your search engine status.

Web River Group's HTML Cleanup service gets rid of all unnecessary font tags, paragraph formatting tags, div tags, text formatting tags, or any other HTML tags placed there by your HTML editor. In most cases, this includes the creation of CSS stylesheets that allow us to reduce the size of your web page by as much as 50% by allowing for the deletion of long, drawn out, repetitive font attributes. This will lead to better search engine acceptance, quicker download times, and easier updates and changes.

If you'd like to take a stab at cleaning up your own HTML code, please follow some of the free guidelines below and contact us if we can assist you in any way.

HTML Cleanup Guidelines

1. Perfection is key! Again, perfectionism is what you need to strive for when creating a search engine friendly website. Pay attention to every line, every tag, and every attribute that exists in your HTML code. The better organized your code, the better your site will look in the eyes of a search engine spider.

2. Get rid of those long font tags. Have you ever seen a website with a long font tag, such as <font color="B7A684" size="1" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">website text</font> repeated for every line of text on the web page? This can double the size, download time and amount of HTML code on your website, and can confuse search engine spiders at the same time.

3. Use a stylesheet. One of the best ways to get rid of all the little attributes on all your pages is to combine them into a CSS stylesheet. This prevents repetition and sloppy code. Read more about CSS stylesheets here.

4. Eliminate unnecessary META header tags. Many so-called SEO gurus will add line after line of repetitive header tags called "abstract" or "extra." These tags do very little good, and only add to the mess that a web page can become. Only use the mandatory META tags. Read more about META tags here.