Html and CSS: Optimizing your HTML by David A. Saharkhiz
Thursday, May 12, 2005 - 05:35 PM

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Optimizing your HTML documents is a must for professional webmasters, and it has many potential benefits. With a little effort and know-how, you can clean up your HTML files and reap the benefits today.

There are three steps to cleaning up your HTML files while you are coding in HTML.

1) Validate your HTML using the free w3C validation service. Validating your HTML provides cleaner HTML code and prevents search engine bots from innacurately reading your pages. Validated code also eliminates useless tags, and can decrease your document's filesize, eliminating wasted bandwidth.

2) Ensure Compatibility - Try to make your HTML code compatible with as many internet browsers as possible. Right now, the Big Two are Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE) and Mozilla Firefox, but it is useful to optimize for older versions of these browsers (many new HTML tags are incompatible with these browsers), as well as other browsers like Opera and Netscape.

3) Eliminate Excessive Whitespace Excessive whitespace is unnessary and keeps your content lower on the page than is necessary. Eliminating excessive whitespace is therefore marginally useful to Search Engine Optimization.

Note: About the Author
David Saharkhiz writes HTML coding tutorials for novice webmasters.

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