W3C is in it’s basic form an organization that sets the “standards” of the online web language. It’s basically the rules in how to format your code. But is being 100% compliant important for your SEO? Will you end up at the bottom of the SERP’s for not being compliant, and number one for been 100% compliant?
What is W3C?
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C for Short) is an international standards organization founded by the inventor of the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee. They develop standards for which the web is run.
This means they set the rules of coding HTML, XHTML, etc. Having standards is important because it sets rules of what everyone should expect. Each browser and each search engine expects code to match these standards, so that they can understand the page.
Without standards every website could be using an inherently different set of code, and yet call it HTML.
Side note: Email clients render HTML completely different for each client, why? Well they don’t really care about the standards for the web. In this case they are dealing with email, email is different from the web. The web, email, ftp, are all forms of communication over the Internet.
How Does this Effect SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website to be better understood by search engines, in the respect of gaining a listing which is higher in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
So we just talked about how the W3C defines the standards that everyone can expect to see for a properly formatted HTML/XHTML page. Now if your website and your code doesn’t meet those standards how well do you think the Search Engines will be able to understand your website?
For a search engine to properly crawl and index your site, it needs to be able to interpret the different elements of your site, such as style, navigation and content. It’s goal is to understand the meaning of the content.
Clean, compliant, expected HTML and CSS code make it much easier for the search engines to determine what is content and understand the meaning of the content.
Do You Need 100% Compliance?
100% compliance is pretty difficult for the most part. If you want to see how your site validates right now you can run over to the W3C Validator tool and just enter your address into the form and see the result. (warning: using their HTML-Tidy script to clean up the code MAY end up with undesired results)
Web Browsers are pretty flexible applications that can handle taking invalid code and still display it properly. In fact most developers will use some invalid code to get everything to appear just right in all the different browsers.
Search Engines can be some what flexible when it comes to valid code. You do not need to be 100% compliant. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t care, it means that you should get as close as you can, because it gives you the leg up on the competition. The easier it is for a SE to read your site the more likely your site is to succeed.
If you run your validation and you get a handful of warnings, or maybe just an error or two that isn’t a high priority you will be okay. However, I have run validation scripts before on sites where almost the entire page was ignored because of certain invalid code at the beginning.
Hiring a developer to look over the site and get you a little closer to validated code is well worth it as a part of your SEO strategies. And it’s okay to take into account a few concessions.
4:50 pm
I think with the recent focus by Google on quality, it would only be natural to assmue that poor code would likely be associated with substandard content. I would be shocked if they weren’t using it as at least some kind of signal.
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3:59 am
Hi Jason,
I personally check and validate my site regularly, at least on the “home” page, and other pages, but if we use Thesis, like your theme, it is pretty hard to validate because it uses DTD strict, i agree.
But i love to validate because its really chalenging than having DTD transitional.
Thanks.
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12:01 pm
It should validate for the most part though. I know I have a couple of small errors on my site, that I haven’t gotten around to fixing. There are two things you can do. Either edit the Thesis theme to use transitional if you find that easier to achieve or just come to terms with that it’s okay not to be fully compliant. You just need to get as close as you can. There are plenty of reasons to have a few errors.
3:36 am
Just ran my keyword analysis engine through the validator and got 131 errors, which is 131 more than I expected. I guess I know what I’ll be doing this afternoon. Thanks for the tip. I come across a lot of blog posts with useless psychobabble, but this was really useful.
1:47 pm
It doesn’t have to be perfect but 131 is definitely excessive. I’m sure there are some important ones to knock out that would benefit you. Sometimes fixing one error will fix many. Depending on the error the validator will find many more errors later because of it’s inability to read the HTML properly beyond the first couple errors depending on the severity.
6:10 pm
I validate the HTML of most all sites I create. This is not only part of my commitment to quality, it also helps debugging CSS and JavaScript. It is always good to have a solid base to build on.