XHTML SEO – Best Practices

There are basically two kinds of SEO practices that you will have to follow for a better position in search engines. You will have to strictly follow both on-page optimization techniques and off-page techniques for better visibility. Here I have listed out the best XHTML/HTML SEO practices for on-page optimization.

1. Use only one header tag per page (h1). H1 tag should be used to represent the main topic of the page.
2. If you have two headings of equal importance in a page, use the same level header for both the title. If one header is a sub-topic of another header use the next level header. For example use <H3> under <H2>, if <H2> is a sub-topic of header <H3>.
3. Never over-use <DIV> tags. Use <DIV> tags only in the appropriate places. Say for example if you want to create an unordered list, it could be achieved using DIV tags, but it would be more appropriate if you use the <UL> tag instead.
4. If you are using XHTML remember to close all the tags. If you are using HTML there might be exceptions to certain tags like <br>.
5. Validate your webpage as and when it is being developed. You can validate your web-page's using W3C’s validator (validator.w3.org) or get the Firefox extension(chrispederick.com/work/web-developer).
6. Stop using styling tags like <font>, <b>, <i> in your main HTML page. Always use CSS to style your HTML pages. When you use HTML/XHTML to frame your content and use all those styling tags in CSS, your page looks clean and is easily indexed, as a result may boost your search engine rankings. In short simple HTML is search engine friendly.
7. The size of the HTML only page is nearly four times higher than the one which is done using a separate CSS.
8. Always remember to include the correct DOCTYPE to tell the browser which version of HTML or XHTML you are using.
9. Do not over-stuff your targeted keyword in the <title> tag.