Importance of w3c validation in SEO

Written by selva on December 12th, 2009

W3C is an international standard organization for World Wide Web. The full form of W3C is World Wide Web Consortium. In 1994, it was established to resolve the difference in technologies, development and creation of content for the internet. It is a free online validation service used by many SEO professionals to ensure that their websites comply with web standards. Ohio SEO Services is a company which has quality SEO professionals and it complies with the web standards.

The question, does W3C compliance impact a site’s search rankings? Has been mulled over on Search Engine journal in the past. It was come to a conclusion that although W3C is important browser compatibility and overall site usability, it does not have a direct impact on Google rankings. Still it is a common practice to make sure one’s pages do validate W3C standards. In the future Google may also include W3C validity in their algorithm to judge the site authority and quality.

Apart from Google there is much more to the web which generates major traffic in the global search market.  In addition, if you want to run a story on Digg or a social media campaign which use a browser like Firefox, which your site may not correctly load, your story will get no attention and you will lose out a lot of potential of hundreds of editorial links. AJS Promotional Media offers good Link Building services that can help you to increase your traffic. Having a smooth and valid site with really good presentation is critical to your company’s reputation.

W3C sets the standards for coding HTML for web pages. It also provides tools to validate your code for free. If you think that your page looks fine in internet explorer, Safari, etc and feel that there is no need for validation then you are looking for proper display only. If you are concerned with SEO then you should validate your source code.

The reason for this is the difference between search engine spiders and browsers. Spiders are basically toned-down web browsers that are not concerned with displaying but with recognizing content and crawl the web indexing web pages and their content.

The web browser developers are under real pressure to make their browsers display pages correctly to the user. The errors in the HTML code like improperly nested elements, unclosed tags, and unrecognized parameters do not affect web page’s display. But, it is an entirely different story when it comes to search engine spiders.

It does not mean that small errors in HTML code will spell death for your search engine rankings. But they can disrupt the important process of a spider parsing your page for all relevant content. Since SEO is paying attention to every little detail of your site and its content, we should not allow problems to arise for search engines when they are trying to index your pages.

Validation might be a big headache while fixing every last error on your pages. But a valid code is very beneficial and it helps in educating you about the mistakes by running your pages through a validation service like W3C.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 12th, 2009 at 6:14 am and is filed under Search Engine Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.