Think of the search engines like a child with a short attention span. If they have to crawl through tons of messy code before they get to the body content on your page, there is a chance they will “lose interest” and not continue spidering the page.Since you want the engines to be able to spider all of your content pages, you should minimize the amount of extraneous code that is on your page. You worked hard to create your content and get your site optimized, so the last thing you want to do is take a chance that the engines won’t want to spider your pages.One way to clean up the code is to take java script that is on-page and put it in an external .js file.
Java script on your page usually takes up anywhere from 3 – 8+ lines of code. That is all just creates extra code that the spiders have to crawl through before they get to your body text. You are better off calling your java script in from a .js file. This takes what used to be many lines of code on your page and reduces it to one line where you just call the script in.
To create an External JavaScript file:
Copy your script and paste it into Notepad. Remove the beginning and end script commands. They are:
<script language=”JavaScript”> and
Next, do a SAVE AS command and save the file as “text only” with an extension of .js
Example: java.js
Upload the file to a folder on your server that you name Java. (Or whatever name you wish.)
To call your Java file into your web page, enter into the same place where the script originally was:<script src=”Java/java.js” mce_src=”Java/java.js”>
Lastly, if you wish to hide the text from JavaScript impaired browsers to avoid error codes, surround the JavaScript with in your java.js file.This will make for cleaner code, and the functionality will still be the same. You could also move your script to the bottom of the page – but remember if the page doesn’t fully load then your script may not load, so it could impact the functionality of your page.
Whatever solution you choose to implement – make sure you test it to ensure it works. Once the engines pick up your pages and the traffic to your site increases, you want to be sure the site is fully functional and in tip top shape.
How to make Java Script Search Engine Friendly - To learn more about this author, visit Jennifer Horowitz's Website.
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