Did you know that the quality of your website code can determine your search results?
Google grades your structure and code proficiency. What that means are the sections designated within your website. The coding capabilities of the people who develop or maintain your site are being evaluated and compared to other sites.
There are little giveaways in how tags are structured, as well as things like inline CSS instead of using a CSS file are current best practices.
Google wants to see who’s using the latest techniques and who isn’t. It doesn’t mean that they’re going to give you a failing grade, but when you’re coding your website or choosing who’s going to code your website, you want to choose someone who is up-to-date on the latest trends and understands what the current techniques and optimization types are.
It’s all about current standards, and that plays an important role when competing for #1. Also, it helps if they’re on top of trending and emerging technologies. It’s essential to be aware of what’s coming and to be trying new things and showing off, especially new features of search engines.
Sometimes they’re rolling out new social media tags, shopping tags, or something that you may not necessarily find valuable, but Google likes to show off their brand new features. This concept was the topic of a previous Facebook live. But the idea is that the people who are adopting new things that they want to show off get preference from Google. They’ll deny it, but there’s evidence over the years that it happens. And if it’s not much extra effort for you, I’d recommend taking a look.
There have been some new trends over the last few years with WordPress since the evolution of frameworks for mobile or responsive design. The frameworks use JavaScript and CSS files, and they tend to be quite large, depending on the features of your site.
You want to look at removing code that you’re not using. For example, if you’re using bootstrap, there are a lot of features that you may not be using. So it would help your site to be leaner if you were to go in and remove what’s not in use.
Besides optimizing your code, there is also minifying, which is the shrinking of the files by removing comments, line breaks, tabs, and spaces. The whole idea is to reduce the file size to make it quicker to load, reducing server and bandwidth overhead. Minification is an advanced technique that I only recommended for experienced developers. But think about it for a second. If your files were smaller, everything would be faster, right?
Also, keep an eye out for are things that you might be missing that your competition isn’t. The real goal here is to stay ahead of your competitors. Keep an eye on them. Become aware of what’s going on in the industry, so you don’t miss a beat. It’s all about staying ahead of the competition. The main point is knowing that they are not ahead of you in some areas that you need to pull up the slack.