Easy2Share Blog!!

From reading the title many of you are probably wondering what W3C compliance has to do with SEO and many more are probably wondering what W3C compliance is at all. Let’s begin by shedding some light on the later.

What Is W3C Compliance?

The W3C is the World Wide Web Consortium and basically, since 1994 the W3C has provided the guidelines by which websites and web pages should be structured and created. The rules they outline are based on the “best practices” and while websites don’t have to comply to be viewed correctly in Internet Explorer and other popular browsers that cater to incorrect design practices, there are a number of compelling reasons to insure that you or your designer insure that the W3C guidelines are followed and that your site is brought into compliance.

Frederick Townes of W3 EDGE Web Design mentioned a number of less SEO-related though very compelling arguments for W3C-complaince. Some non-SEO reasons to take on this important step in the lifecycle of your site are:

• Compliance help insure accessibility for the disabled.
• Compliance helps insure that your website is accessible from a number of devices; from different browsers to the growing number of surfers using PDA’s and cellular phones.
• Compliance will also help insure that regardless of the browser, resolution, device, etc. that your website will look and function in the same or at least a very similar fashion.

At this point you may be saying, “Well that’s all well-and-good but what does this have to do with SEO?” Good question.

“Proper use of standards and bleeding edge best practices makes sure that not only is the copy marked up in a semantic fashion which search engines can interpret and weigh without confusion, it also skews the content-to-code ratio in the direction where it needs to be while forcing all of the information in the page to be made accessible, thus favoring the content. We’ve seen several occasions where the rebuilding of a site with standards, semantics and our proprietary white hat techniques improves the performance of pages site-wide in the SERPs.”

A fairly logical conclusion, reduce the amount of code on your page and the content (you know, the place where your keywords are) takes a higher priority. Additionally compliance will, by necessity, make your site easily spidered and additionally allow you greater control over which portions of your content are given more weight by the search engines.

Examples

The W3 EDGE site serves as good examples of site that performed better after complying with W3C standards. The biggest jumps were on Yahoo! with lesser though still significant increases being noticed on both Google and MSN.

How To Bring Web Site In Compliance With W3C Standards?

To be sure, this is easier said than done. Obviously the ideal solution is to have your site designed in compliance to begin with. If you already have a website you have one of two options:

1. Hire a designer familiar with W3C standards and have your site redone, or
2. Prepare yourself for a big learning curve and a bit of frustration (though well worth both).

Resources

Assuming that you’ve decided to do the work yourself there are a number of great resources out there. By far the best is the Web Developer extension for FireFox. You’ll have to install the FireFox browser first and then install the extension. Among other great tools for SEO this extension provides a one-click check for compliance and provides a list of where your errors are, what’s causing them and links to solutions right from the W3C. The extension provides testing for HTML, XHTML, CSS and Accessibility compliance.