A web design trick I learned very early on in my career is “peeking under the hood”: glancing at another site’s source code to see how they pulled off some visual trick or another. I taught myself a good number of JavaScript techniques that way; granted, this was when the technology was being used solely for mouseover effects, pop-up windows, and the like. Anyway, I’ve come to discover that peering at another site’s source is not so much a trick as it is common design practice. Just as long as you’re not brazenly plagiarizing the source in the process.

So when we began to get our feet wet with SEO, I took the same approach. Checking out high-ranking sites to see how they do it. As we all know, though, there’s far more to optimizing a site than what one can find in the source code. But it still makes for a good starting point. And in the process I did discover something rather interesting, something that happens to be the exact opposite of what I was looking for. Many of these sites were actually succeeding in spite of their code, rather than because of it!

There seems to be a few levels of this transgression. The most glaring is where some sites are lacking the pure fundamentals. The stuff that can be considered best practices for both SEO and design. Images that were missing ALT attributes. Headings or important segments of text placed as graphics on the page. The complete absence of heading tags of any level (i.e. <H1>, <H2>, and on down). Pages without titles, or – almost as bad – with misspelled titles. These are the things that neither a designer nor an optimizer should be letting slip.

Then there’s the faults that may be a little more “high-concept”, and may boil down to design techniques and philosophies. But they’re still things I’d never expect to find in a high-ranking site. Bulky tables-based layouts, or CSS and JavaScript that ought to be kept in a separate file are all just things to get between the spiders and the meaty optimized content. And while I do know that W3C validation is not an outright requirement, I did come across sites that boasted valid markup, yet failed validation!

The realms of both search engine optimization and web site design are so vast, few companies are equipped to handle a significant portion of either, let alone both.  All the same, both industries will continue to coexist on many a project. In order to do so harmoniously, designers will need to learn how to gear their code toward quality optimization techniques, and SEO experts will need to learn what HTML formatting helps their cause, and in what ways. And if, heaven forbid, you find yourself wearing both the hat of web coder and search engine optimizer, the need to be well versed in both fields is that much more important, lest you wish to become your own worst enemy!