Sometime around 27/7/10 (at 12:39 +0100) Steven Hughes said:
[…snip…] the SEO of this site is pretty poor in my opinion.
The use of internal vs. external CSS doesn’t affect SEO. Both methods
are perfectly ‘legal’ in technical terms, and Google is hella good at
spotting text content buried underneath structural logic and other
code.
Because of the typical management and workflow methods that fit best
with direct code editing processes (Dreamweaver, BBEdit, Coda, etc.)
it is definitely more efficient to externalise all CSS. But if you’re
working in Freeway those issues are taken care of; the management and
workflow control is inherent in how you work there.
The way the code is generated by Freeway depends to a surprisingly
large degree on how you create your layout. Knowing a bit about how
HTML works and applying that to how you put your layouts together can
make a big difference to the efficiency of the underlying code
structures. This can help a little with SEO, although it is FAR
from a black & white issue. Don’t stress about the SEO aspects here,
but do try to improve your layout production understanding.
Internal links - that’s a curious thing to bring up, but it is simple
to deal with… just make links from one page to another using the
normal Freeway linking feature and you get internal links. 
Standard tags - now this IS a VERY good point. Again, it is something
that’s not at all hard to deal with, it is just a matter of learning
and applying a little discipline. Create your own H1, H2, H3 etc
styles, create a ‘body’ style and let that work as a page-wide
default so you don’t have to format everything directly. Use the CSS
Menus action for your site navigation… the techie structure of the
one in your site looks a little odd to me.
In your case, use the H1 for the “BEAUTIFULLY APPOINTED” text, H2 for
the red “A REAL ESTATE PROPERTY” below it, and use your custom ‘body’
style to automatically format your main text in that grey style, font
and size. Although the underlying thinking is somewhat simplistic the
fact remains that you shouldn’t use those ‘H’ styles elsewhere on the
page.
Should I be concerned with their opinion? Does google ranking really
get effected by the way the coding is structured or written?
There are things that do matter and things that just don’t…
A clean and simple layout structure is a good thing in general, and
it can help search engines ‘read’ content in the right order, but
other than that it isn’t a particularly important factor.
Using the right styles for semantic structure of your text content
(head styles flag important ‘header’ text, and so on) IS very
helpful. Do this.
More important than ANY of all that, make sure your pages have
machine-readable text that people will want to find. THAT is really
what lies behind ANY fiddly details of how search engines work. All
they want to do is deliver relevant results when someone does a
search.
k
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