The Swiffer Wet Jet and Coding for SEO

I recently purchased another in the 6000 different kinds of swiffer’s out there, the swiffer wet jet. I know it’s very unrockstar of me to be talking about this, but that thing rules! No more smelly mop and mop bucket.

Alright, so why the hell am i talking about this? The swiffer wet jet was an upgrade for me from your conventional mop. It’s a much more efficient way of cleaning my floor. It dries in seconds, it has a button that you push that sprays exactly the amount of cleaning solution that you need to clean your floor and when you’re done, you just throw away the pad. Clean, efficient and easy.

This concept can be much like putting together your code for a website. I’m finding that a good chunk of what’s good for SEO lies in the code of your site. Being a coder myself, this is all very clear to me anyway. I’ve learned as a coder that creating clean semantic markup makes updating, changing your site cake. If you really want to read a great book on creating clean, cross browser compatible code, check out Jeffrey Zeldman’s book “Designing with Web Standards“. That book was like the bible to me and got me going creating good, clean code. Little did I know at the time that i started coding, that I was at the same time practicing standards that are perfect for SEO.

If you want to see what a crawler see’s that is scowering your site looking for relevant content that is going to eventually deem you most worthy of a search term, do a “view –> source” in your browser. Now start scrolling through the code, and see how hard it is to find content that really hits home… If this code now looks like the matrix and you are already frustrated, the same thing is happening to the crawler. Crawlers hate code that looks like a rats nest. I will get into good practices in coding your site at a later time, it’s not the discussion i want to get into now.

What I do want to get into is getting a developer into the line of thinking of cleaning the site up like a swiffer mop as opposed to cleaning the old fashioned way, like a mop and bucket. There are great new ways to make code on a site clean and beautiful, even with a lot of content (CSS, external javascript, ajax), and as a developer, you need to be just as proactive with cleaning your code as I am proactive at keeping up with the search engine algorythm. Tabular messy design still works, and you can still make a good looking site with it, but that site that looks good to a user does not look good to a crawler. A mop and bucket will clean a floor, but the time and effort it takes, and the stench that builds up is overall not as effective as the new swiffer.

All in all, writing clean code will not only make for a better webmaster sitebuilding and editing experience, but will also give you a great clean start to launching your SEO campain. A good chunk of SEO is spent fixing problems in underlying code to then be able to be proactive in your campain. Writing clean, efficient, swiffer wet-jet like code will allow you to instantly focus SEO time to driving traffic to your site, instead of trying to find ways to make the crawlers happy in order to just get your site indexed properly.