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Calgary Software Application and Web Development Articles |
The Science of Compliance: Does W3C influence search engines?
Does your website comply to W3C? More to the point does your website
need to? There are lots of people who hang on the mass of buzzwords
that surround anything that's remotely Internet. The question being is
W3C just another hot topic with little real grounding? With SEO
becoming ever more important, many are suggesting W3C may hold part of
the secrete to improving search indexing and in turn rankings. W3C has
been around for a while and has roots that are firmly set at creating a
set of standards from which the Internet can grow. Although it's been
evolving since 1994 it's only over the last 2 or 3 years or so that W3C
has entered more mainstream discussions concerning site design and SEO.
Some SEO's suggest failure to comply with W3C will turn search engines
off of the job of indexing a website. Some of this is either SEO's
purposely over complicating their roles or simply not fully
understanding the reality. Evidence tends to suggest that all but the
worst errors are dealt with by most of the big search engines and
therefore the vast majority of websites will get indexed without any
real problem. If there is any doubt then perhaps the W3C code validator
is a good place to start. The idea being so long as everything is
successfully parsed there's a good chance the site will the indexed by
engines. Having said that, there have been occasions when every
conceivable website seems to fail in one-way or another, even the big
ones. If the likes of Microsoft, Dell and even Google fail quite so
cataclysmically, it could be surly be argued that it's perhaps not
worth putting too much emphasis on validation at all.
A lot of W3C revolves around the process of designing websites while
keeping the visually impaired users in mind. The truth however, is
those Browsers such as Lynx and Jaws tend to view a web page in a
similar way to search spiders in any case. The best approach for the
time being at least is to keep W3C and the World Wide Web Consortium's
standards in mind and begin to clue up on the requirements. To get too
hung up on compliance at the moment could saddle a designer / SEOer
with an awful lot of hard and unnecessary analysis that'll bring little
advantage. As the Internet moves forward many are predicting that W3C
will become more of a plus point with search engine ranking. Therefore
moving gradually to compliant standards could be a positive strategy,
but possibly a long-term one.
This article is free to republish provided the resource information remains intact
Paul Coupe is lead designer / developer with Zoom Online.
Zoom Online - Providing total online solutions.
Contact: paul@zoom-online.co.uk
http://www.zoom-online.co.uk/e-marketing/The_Science_of_Compliance_Does_W3C_influence_search_engines.htm
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