Lodefizzle, SEO and Coding

Mike Davidson of mikeindustries.com has a much publicized critique of SEO and HTML coding that has been brought up enough to warrant a revisit.

The conclusions of his four tests:

1. The H1 tag does indeed assert some dominance and we can therefore assume you are better off using proper headings in your HTML documents.
2. The mere appearance of many nested tables in your code does not have a strong enough negative effect to be considered a drag on search engine ranking.
3. It’s not clear that validity helps search engine ranking, but it’s definitely true that certain errors in your code can get you completely removed from indexes.
4. The semantic effect of hierarchical HTML headings is a stronger factor in search rankings than more rudimentary measures such as physical keyword placement.
5. Although good semantics are somewhat valuable in optimization, simple things like proper titles, descriptive filenames, and incoming links are dramatically more important.

I won’t speak about his linking conclusion here - SEOs are familiar enough with the impact of linking in quantity, quality and relevance - though I do want to address some of his coding conclusions. On first glance, it seems that clean code is not that important - well, at least when considering TITLEs, content and links. He’s right on that, but it is dangerous to discount clean code. Of the 100+ factors search engines use to determine placement in their SERPs, clean code is obviously among them. Take it from Mike after conclusion two:

I imagine the only negative affect at all was because the ratio of “lodefizzle” to other content on the page was slightly lowered by the addition of more code. This, however, could be an argument to keep your code as small as possible.

Therefore, if your content and linking (ha!) is where you want it, it’s time to look at the code. Raising the content-to-code ratio is key here. Besides, less code means less bandwidth usage and quicker loading times, which is arguably part of online marketing in and of itself.