SEO providers have a habit of discussing what they do in terms of keywords and backlinks. When pitching new customers, they talk about content marketing and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. All those things are good and necessary. Yet what happens under the hood on any given website is just as important. So why don’t SEO providers talk about clean code?
Clean code is one of the pillars of strong technical SEO. While human visitors never see the underlying code, search engine spiders and user devices do. And because they do, the cleanliness of a site’s code affects everything from indexing and ranking to site navigation.
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Your Crawl Budget Is Limited
Did you know that your organization’s website has a crawl budget? It has nothing to do with finances or marketing spend. Crawl budget is the amount of time allotted for search engine spiders to spend crawling your site. It is a limited budget, too.
The more quickly and efficiently a spider can crawl your site, the more data it can gather in its limited time. But if your site is weighed down by bloated HTML, long trails of questionable JavaScript, or even redundant CSS, you are forcing spiders to spend precious time gathering less data than they otherwise could. On the other hand, clean code invites spiders to quickly move through your site and gather the maximum amount of data.
Algorithms Need to Understand Why
Indexing is just the first half of the equation. The second half is ranking. And in order for search engines to correctly rank, their algorithms need to understand ‘why’ a page exists. What does it have to offer? How is it useful to users? Getting to the ‘why’ of a page is heavily dependent on semantic HTML.
Clean semantic HTML helps algorithms understand indexed pages by providing:
- Clarity – It helps algorithms tell the difference between things like primary headings and sidebars.
- Accessibility – It indicates whether a website aligns with accessibility standards. Accessibility is becoming a higher priority for search engines, by the way.
- Context – Paired with proper schema markup and lean code, clean semantic HTML provides the context that fuels things like which snippets and ‘people also ask’ boxes.
The better a search engine algorithm understands a page, the more accurately it can rank that page. Clean code plays a role in ensuring that a page is correctly understood.
Mobile-First Is the Standard
At Pixsan in San Diego, CA, clean code is an SEO and web development priority because of the realities of the mobile-first mindset. Years ago, Google announced it was developing a mobile-first index that would eventually become the standard. The search engine giant made good on its promise. Today, mobile-first is the indexing standard.
Websites with heavy back ends will struggle on mobile devices even if they work flawlessly on the desktop. Remember that mobile devices tend to have slower processors and are often tied to data limits.
Web development that prioritizes clean code also focuses on reducing render-blocking resources. Users see the important stuff more quickly, thereby reducing bounce rates and increasing both traffic and SEO authority.
Play the Long Game
Whether your organization handles web development in-house or contracts with a service provider, make sure you are playing the long game. The cumulative benefits of SEO build over time. Clean code lays the foundation by supporting efficient crawling, indexing, and mobile-first priorities.
If your website’s code is not as clean as it should be, make cleaning it up a priority. The time and effort will pay for itself in the long run.