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Tuesday, May 8

Does W3C Compliance Impact SEO?

From the title of this article, many of you may be wondering, what exactly is W3C compliance and what does it have to do with SEO? I'll start by giving a quick rundown on W3C Compliance, then how it can impact your search ranking.

What is W3C Compliance?
W3C stands for the World Wide Web Consortium which has been established to provide guidelines about how webpage's should be created and structured. The group publishes a number of best practice design principles which should be employed by webmasters when creating any new pages for their site.

W3C Compliance ensures your code meets these guidelines and will render the same or very similar across all major browsers and platforms. Validating your code to comply with these standards is easy - simply use the W3C Code Validator.

What Does it Mean for SEO?
Put simply: Bringing your code into compliance with W3C guidelines will help your SEO efforts. There are a couple of major reasons for this which includes the spider's ability to read your code and position of your content.

By ensuring your code complies with W3C standards you are creating a very clean and well structured HTML document which becomes easy reading for search engine spiders. By removing excess tags and generating neat code, search spiders can easily determine where your content starts and ends to rank the document without confusion.

Cleaning the code also skews the content-code ratio towards the content side and brings important keywords to the top of the page - both of which can help search engine ranking.

While W3C Validation is unlikely to be the "magic potion" to top search engine results (nothing is these days) it's a great way to get an edge over competitors in search competitive industries. You'll also be left with a website that is accessible across more browsers and operating systems - something that is sure to help conversion in the long run!

4 Comments

At 1:44 PM, Roger Wehbe said...: I am going to have to disagree with you there :)

WC3 standards allows everyone .... well to have a standard. However you don't have to have 100% WC3 valid code in order to rank.

As long as the code is not so bad as to stop a spider, you will be ok. WC3 is great for someone that needs a standard to follow.. but as long as the search engine can read the site it doesn't matter if it does not follow WC3 standards 100%. It's a good guideline to follow just to be in compliance overall.. it says that the coder is following a standard... but in terms of SEO and WC3 .. it's not required.. it just allows for your site to be in compliance.
At 1:39 AM, Matthew Elshaw said...: Hi Roger,

Your right in saying HTML code doesn't need to be 100% W3C compliant in order to rank, but modifying your code to comply with the standard can not hurt your SEO efforts.

Many website owners make the mistake of including unnecessary code on their HTML or structuring the document in the wrong order. This can make it difficult for spiders to crawl your website and assign a ranking to your webpage's. Complying with the standard fixes this problem and ensures your page is given the ranking it deserves. In competitive industries - this could be the edge many website owners are looking for.
At 1:39 AM, Andy said...: I never knew Warcraft 3 had anything to do with xhtml compliance.

I think you mean W3C ;)
At 3:03 AM, Jhourlad Estrella said...: Let's all be positive here. Although compliance with the W3C standards is not directly related to SEO, it still is a factor. Quoting Roger he said "W3C Compliance ensures your code meets these guidelines and will render the same or very similar across all major browsers and platforms". As we all know, Google bot and other search engine spider is another form of a User Agent, acting somewhat like a browser. Writing your pages in a way that is readable "across all major browsers and platforms" ensures SE spiders can read it clearly. Quoting Matthew again, "Cleaning the code also skews the content-code ratio towards the content side and brings important keywords to the top of the page - both of which can help search engine ranking." I agree with him. Old HTML standards are too junky and burdens the pages with too many unnecessary tags. Following the W3C standards ensures high content ratio over codes which is a good factor in SEO.

Just a personal thought.