How Does W3C Standards Effect SEO?

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is a recognized Web standards group. It develops and publishes specifications, software, guidelines, and tools for the Web, including HTML and accessibility standards.

Now how does W3C standards effect SEO? Well, the search engine technology (spiders) that’s built to go out and crawl the web has an easier time crawling valid HTML and XHTML than it does a website’s code that is hacked together. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve done a comprehensive SEO review on a new client’s site, who’s no where to be found in the search engines, and found that it was related to a simple HTML issue.

To find out if your website conforms to W3C standards is easy. W3C validator tool checks your website to see where the mistakes are and gives you feedback. Do you want to make sure that your CSS is accessible for all browsers? Use the W3C CSS Validation Service.

Conforming to W3C standards isn’t just for SEO. By designing your site to W3C standards, you’ll make your website accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities who represents 8% to 10% of the total population.

Note: While W3C Standards makes it easier for the search engines to crawl your site, it does not effect your rankings…that’s another discussion to be saved at a later date.