Page size and construction are also important SEO elements that will have an impact on your website. Page size is important because search engines will index content up to a certain volume before truncation occurs. And the construction of a page is important as the construction elements may present indexing problems if done using special technologies such as AJAX.
Page size is the first element we will look at.
Page size is important because search engines have to limit the size of a document for any single page. Pages that are incredibly long could present an issue for search engines. Another factor connected to this is the time it takes the page to load. Pages that are large in size may take users a long time to view, which search engines want to avoid returning.
If search engines returned pages of an immense size, they would take a long time to load, thus putting users of using the search results. To avoid this, search engines place strict guidelines to prevent this from happening.
Current index allowances per search engine are as follows:
Google > Will index up to 130kb of raw text content, documents bigger then 100kb will be truncated
Yahoo > Will index up to 780kb of raw text content, documents bigger then 500kb will be truncated
MSN > Will index up to 1.4mb of raw text content, documents bigger then 850kb will be truncated
As you can see, the allowances are large, most websites that are built well should not exceed 100kb per page. Please note that these figures are PER PAGE and not per all the pages. This does not mean that your whole website needs to be smaller than a certain figure, this means that each page in the website should be below 100kb per page.
Websites built in today's technologies typically utilize CSS (Cascading style sheets) which reduces the pages size by reducing the amount of coding required to generate the page.
An average size of a webpage should range between 8kb and 60kb.
Keep the pages on your website below 100kb to avoid truncation. If you find that pages in your website exceed this, you can find an array of HTML compression tools on www.download.com.
Page Construction:
Page construction is an important part of SEO as the construction of a page can have an impact on how that page is indexed.
The nature of a search engine is to index raw content from any webpage by parsing it from the HTML. Search engines strip out all the text based content in order to perform indexing and relevancy calculation. If the page is built in a certain way or technology, it can stop search engines from properly filtering out the text based content leaving errors and problems with page indexation.
These problems are typically overcome by Google with the advancements of Google's algorithm.
Below are some of the most commonly occurring construction issues:
META / HEAD tags not closed properly:
This problem occurs more frequently than the other issues listed. This happens when a page has not had the meta data or head data closed properly.
Leaks in these tags can cause entire pages to be indexed incorrectly or not at all.
Examples of this error include:
Closing the tag incorrectly:
</HEAD
<HEAD> instead of </HEAD>
<HED> < spelling mistake
Javascript / AJAX Overflow:
This problem occurs when dynamic content technologies do not close properly or do not deliver content unless a user agent requests the page.
When search engines request a page, the content may not be rendered depending on the Javascript or Ajax that is utilized.
Search engines parse code to find text, dynamic web 2.0 technologies deliver content to visitors, but when search engines request the document, they find no content to index, which can cause all sorts of issues including supplemental results.
Overflow errors can occur if the scripts being used utilize cache-profiling or DCP (dynamic cache profiling).
UN-Closed HTML Elements:
HTML or PHP/ASP code that is not closed or opened properly can mean entire chunks of content are indexed incorrectly or not at all.
It is important to ensure all tags use an open and close bracket and use the right closing methods. Any coding that is not closed properly will cause HTML code to leak into the raw text meaning that an entire page maybe indexed with 50% of the visible content being HTML.
Invalid HTML Scripting:
Sometimes coding errors occur as a result of an incorrectly coded page. These coding issues are typically overcome by search engines depending on the level of the error.
Visiting websites with significant coding problems may flag error messages when the page is requested.
