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W3C Compliance & SEO
By Dave Davies (c) 2005

From reading the title many of you are probably wondering what
W3C compliance has to do with SEO and many more are probably
wondering what W3C compliance is at all. Let's begin by
shedding some light on the later.

What Is W3C Compliance?

The W3C is the World Wide Web Consortium and basically, since
1994 the W3C has provided the guidelines by which websites and
web pages should be structured and created. The rules they
outline are based on the "best practices" and while websites
don't have to comply to be viewed correctly in Internet Explorer
and other popular browsers that cater to incorrect design
practices, there are a number of compelling reasons to insure
that you or your designer insure that the W3C guidelines are
followed and that your site is brought into compliance.

In an interview with Frederick Townes of W3 EDGE Web Design
(http://www.w3-edge.com/) he mentioned a number of less
SEO-related though very compelling arguments for W3C-complaince.
Some non-SEO reasons to take on this important step in the
lifecycle of your site are:

• Compliance help insure accessibility for the disabled.

• Compliance helps insure that your website is accessible
  from a number of devices; from different browsers to the
  growing number of surfers using PDA's and cellular phones.

• Compliance will also help insure that regardless of the
  browser, resolution, device, etc. that your website will
  look and function in the same or at least a very similar
  fashion.

At this point you may be saying, "Well that's all well-and-good
but what does this have to do with SEO?" Good question.

We at Beanstalk have seen many examples of sites performing
better after we had brought them, or even just their homepage,
into compliance with W3C standards. While discussing this with
Frederick he explained it very well with:

"Proper use of standards and bleeding edge best practices makes
sure that not only is the copy marked up in a semantic fashion
which search engines can interpret and weigh without confusion,
it also skews the content-to-code ratio in the direction where
it needs to be while forcing all of the information in the page
to be made accessible, thus favoring the content. We've seen
several occasions where the rebuilding of a site with standards,
semantics and our proprietary white hat techniques improves the
performance of pages site-wide in the SERPs."

Essentially what he is stating is a fairly logical conclusion -
reduce the amount of code on your page and the content (you
know, the place where your keywords are) takes a higher
priority. Additionally compliance will, by necessity, make your
site easily spidered and also allow you greater control over
which portions of your content are given more weight by the
search engines.

Examples

The Beanstalk website and the W3 EDGE site themselves serve as
good examples of sites that performed better after complying
with W3C standards. With no other changes than those required
to bring our site into compliance the Beanstalk site saw instant
increases. The biggest jumps were on Yahoo! with lesser though
still significant increases being noticed on both Google and
MSN.

As we don't give out client URLs, I can't personally list off
client site examples we've noticed the same effect on, however
we can use W3 EDGE as another example of a site that noticed
increases in rankings based solely on compliance.

So How Do I Bring My Site In Compliance With W3C Standards?

To be sure, this is easier said than done. Obviously the ideal
solution is to have your site designed in compliance to begin
with. If you already have a website, you have one of two
options:

1. Hire a designer familiar with W3C standards and have your
   site redone, or
2. Prepare yourself for a big learning curve and a bit of
   frustration (though well worth both).

Resources

Assuming that you've decided to do the work yourself there are a
number of great resources out there. By far the best that I've
found in my travels is the Web Developer extension for FireFox
(http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/). You'll have to
install the FireFox browser first and then install the extension.
Among other great tools for SEO this extension provides a
one-click check for compliance and provides a list of where your
errors are, what's causing them and links to solutions right
from the W3C. The extension provides testing for HTML, XHTML,
CSS and Accessibility compliance.

Other resources you'll definitely want to check into are:

• CSS Zen Garden (http://www.csszengarden.com/)
• A List Apart (http://www.alistapart.com/)
• Holy CSS ZeldMan! (http://www.dezwozhere.com/links.html)
 (Frederick lists this one as one of the best resources for
  the novice to find answers. I have to agree.)

Where Do I Get Started?

The first place to start would be to download FireFox (count
this as reason #47 to do so as it's a great browser) and install
the Web Developer extension. This will give you easy access to
testing tools.

The next step is to bookmark the resources above.

Once you've done these you'd do well to run the tests on your
own site while at the same time keeping up an example site that
already complies so you can look at their code if need be.

To give you a less frustrating start I would recommend beginning
with your CSS validation. Generally CSS validation is easier
and faster than the other forms. In my humble opinion, it's
always best to start with something you'll be able to accomplish
quickly to reinforce that you can in fact do it.

After CSS, you'll need to move on to HTML or XHTML validation.
Be prepared to set aside a couple hours if you're a novice with
a standard site. More if you have a large site of course.

Once you have your CSS and HTML/XHTML validated its time to
comply with Accessibility standards. What you will be doing is
cleaning up a ton of your code and moving a lot into CSS, which
means you'll be further adding to your style sheet. If you're
not comfortable with CSS, you'll want to revisit the resources
above. CSS is not a big mystery, though it can be challenging in
the beginning. As a pleasant by-product, you are sure to find a
number of interesting effects and formats that are possible with
CSS that you didn't even know were so easily added to your
site.

But What Do I Get From All This?

Once you're done you'll be left with a compliant site that not
only will be available on a much larger number of browsers
(increasingly important as browsers such as FireFox gain more
users) but you'll have a site with far less code that will
rank higher on the search engines because of it.

To be sure, W3C validation is not the "magic bullet" to top
rankings. In the current SEO world, there is no one thing that
is. However, as more and more websites are created and
competition for top positioning gets more fierce, it's important
to take every advantage you can to not only get to the first
page, but to hold your position against those who want to take
it from you as you took it from someone else.

================================================================
Dave Davies is the CEO of Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning,
Inc. (http://www.beanstalk-inc.com) He writes with years of
experience in SEO and Internet Marketing. A special thanks go out
to Frederick Townes of W3 EDGE for his help with this article.
W3 EDGE (http://www.w3-edge.com/) provides W3C-compliant web
site design for their clients. To keep update on new SEO
article be sure to visit the Beanstalk blog
(http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/blog/) regularly for up-to-date
SEO news.
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