If there are errors within the code then search engines will have to skip that part of the code as they will be unable to read it. This can seriously effect the SEO results for your website as search engines like Google need to be able to read the whole thing in order to rank your site effectively in their database. If there are errors they may miss essential parts of your content that would improve ranking results.

The main coding standard is set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and their validator can help you determine if there are any errors in your code that need to be fixed. They will also detail what the exact errors are so you or your developers can get them fixed straight away.

W3C was started up 10 years ago by the inventor of the WWW Tim Berners-Lee and he still maintains his role in the consortium to oversee the new standards that are set for the latest coding languages.

If you are clearing your website to meet W3C standards you should ensure to select the correct level as appropriate to your website, otherwise you may need that errors do not match and cannot be fixed depending on how the code was written. Most websites will have a document header at the top of the code to tell the search engines which level you have cleared to so that they know in what language the Google Bot should then read the code in without coming across unnecessary errors.

WAI validation is another well known coding standard used by SEO companies to ensure that the site meets accessibility standards which are developed for internet users with disabilities. Usually you only need to clear your website to the first level of WAI compliancy which is required so that users can listen to what is written within an image alt tag if they cannot see the image itself. This is quite simple to do and is enough for most websites targeting the general public.

For more information on how to make your website easy to crawl for search engines and meet coding standards visit SEOJunkies who are experts at optimising websites. We have years of search engine optimisation experience as well as the knowledge to maintain a modern, attractive design whilst still being SEO friendly.

About the Author: SEO Junkies (Advansys Limited)
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In this article, we will discuss about the advantages of following web standards.

World Wide Web Consortium

Web standards: Web standard is a general term for the formal standard and other technical specification, established by the W3C and other standard bodies.

W3C: The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international industry consortium dedicated to “leading the Web to its full potential”. It’s headed d by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web.

Advantages of web standards:

1. Consistent Look and Feel: All styles are defined separately in a central CSS file. Separation of style from the content enables to give a consistent look and feel to the website.

2. Improved search engine ranking: CSS driven website helps in improving content to code ration by removing junk code. This improves the structural organization of the code, thereby improving its readability. Using optimized content rich code makes it easy for the search engine to index it more accurately and achieve better ranking.

3. Easy to maintain: Having all the styles defined in single CSS file makes the maintenance easy. It eliminates the tedious job of making same changes on each and every page. It is easy to understand the semantic and structured code even though created by some one else.

4. Cross browser compatible: Writing clean code that conforms to the W3C standards will give consistent results across all browser platforms. Major browsers include – IE6, IE7, Safari, Firefox (Windows and Mac), Opera.

5. Accessible to different devices: Semantic HTML, where structure is separated from presentation, makes it easy to interpret the content on different devices like cell phones, PDA, screen reader.

6. Minimal bandwidth requirement: Clean, structured code with all presentation elements in single file, helps in decreasing the file size and results in quicker downloads.

Conclusion

Using Standard compliant code, one can make sure that the code is properly structured and semantically coded. It is easy to manage and make changes in well formatted website.

In nutshell, standard based websites are more accessible across all browsers, operating systems and different devices. They use low bandwidth and perform well in search engines.

About the Author

SEO-Semantic-XHTML.com transforms your design files from various familiar image formats (PSD, JPG, GIF, etc) into high quality cross-browser compatible, 100% hand coded, W3C validated (X)HTML. Visit SEO Semantic XHTML for our PSD to XHTML Conversion & slicing services