Well XHTML is deemed better these days because its seen as a cleaner version of the original HTML and thats why quite a few people are following the strict rules to get to valid XHTML.

However, it doesn’t really affect SEO. You would have thought that the search engines would have chosen to put these cleaner websites above the ordinary, bad-coded websites (in general) to improve their results but they still choose to treat them as an ordinary website.

If your website isn’t valid XHTML, I recommend you spend the time to make it valid because you never know, it may help you in future if search engines do decide to put XHTML valid websites in priority.

If your website loads up real slow, then its obviously going to put some people off from visiting your website, and Search Engines may think twice before crawling your pages. That means its important to lower the loading times of your website, so here are some basic tips that you should follow, if you don’t already.

• Images - Don’t save your images in a BMP format whatever you do. It may be good quality, but the file size will be absolutely massive, with a normal image being over 1 megabyte. Say you had 10 BMP files to load on your website as well as the content, it would take forever to load. Save it as JPG or PNG instead, these are much smaller. Remember though, keep quality and size both in mind.
• Javascript - Don’t overuse javascript. Although you mind need some javascript in (which is fine) but when you call a lot of scripts on the same page, it tends to slow down a website dramatically. Do your best to use as least as possible. Another thing you could do is put all of the javascript code at the bottom of the webpage (but before the /body tag) so that all of your content loads up first, and the javascript afterwards.
• MySQL - Like the last tip, don’t overly use MySQL too. You shouldn’t really have to use much MySQL on your normal pages anyway (if at all) but if you do, don’t overdo it.
• Complications - Don’t over complicate your HTML or PHP coding - Keep it as short and light as possible, you don’t want to use lots of while loops in your PHP or its going to slow it down. The less code you do generally, the quicker it will load up.
• External Files - If you are going to include other files, make sure you do it locally and don’t do it for other websites. For example, if you want to load an image you found, make sure you host it yourself near where the webpage is hosted instead of directly linking it from the website. Reasons for this is, well firstly, the site might stop hotlinking so you can’t do it, but also, you’re using up their bandwidth, and it isn’t really helping your website too.
• Ads - If your webpage(s) are completely full of ads, it will definately slow it down because it has to retrieve a lot of information. One ad or maybe even two ad blocks is fine, but if you go any higher than that, you need to be careful.

So there you have it, some nice easy tips for you to follow. I recommend that you listen to these tips and then follow them to make you, your visitors and the Search Engines happy!

Doing well on Search Engines should be a big thing in all webmaster’s minds because it can lead to a lot more traffic if done correctly. This is the point of this tutorial. It will explain how to optimize your websites to make your life easier when trying to get higher up in these Search Engines.

Tips

• Web Page Names - With your web page names, call them relative to what the content holds, and use good keywords in this. For example page1.html is a good example of a bad page name. It doesn’t give an idea of what the webpage is all about, but if you called the page laptop-information.html, Google can get a lot more from the webpage, and may give you a small edge over other sites that don’t use this technique.
• META Tags - Use META Tags in the head section of your web document. Title tags, Keyword tags and Description tags can help to get more traffic from the search engines because people may search for the keywords in your META Keyword tag, which means that your site may display in the results. Find out more about this here.
• Images - When you use images on your website, use an alt tag. If you don’t know what one of these is, its a small description about the image. It can make that image appear on Google Image Search, or it can just help with your Search Engine Results. To use these, place alt=”Description” straight after the src=”link” mce_src=”link”. You’ll end up with this code: src=”link” alt=”Description” with obviously the image tags before and afterwards.
• Content - Use keyword-rich content on your webpages. Not only will more people be more interested because its more informative, but Search Engines like this.

Enjoy these tips on how to optimize your webpages, and good luck trying to get higher up in the Search Engines.