To W3C or Not To W3C that is the question.

W3C or the World Wide Web Consortium is a body concerned with Internet standards as they relate to the ‘wellformedness’ of web-page coding, usability concerns and cross browser compatibility. They have laid down certain standards for the syntactical structure of XHTML and CSS Coding with a view to the promotion of a worldwide standard with which all website’s should comply; the reality is of course that most do not.

W3C compliance has long been a grey area in SEO circles and the cause of some heated debate. There is no overall consensus with a 50/50 split between those who feel it to be vital and those who think of it as nothing more than an anally retentive exercise in unnecessary orderliness.

I have to admit that I have been an avid supporter of compliant code for some time and will not let any page near my server until it is given the green light (header) by the W3C ‘validator’. Recent Google trends would appear to suggest that more weight is being given to page load times than ever before. Compliant code makes a page far easier to parse as it tends to conform to a more logical (and predictable) tag and attribute structure thus decreasing the load time.

However, it is important to note thatW3C code compliance is not (yet) an absolute operator in the Google algorithm. This would not make sense in the ‘real’ world as most of the worlds online content is in fact, non compliant and many sites run by large corporations such as the BBC do not get the green light treatment from the ‘validator’.

In spite of this I still feel that it is worth considering an application of the W3C methodology to small sites and those which need an extra boost in the search engines. It is all about relative advantage and the exploitation of brownie points when we are considering sites that operate at the level of SMEs or private individuals. Having a compliant, fast loading site with a high content to code ratio will definitely help to increase or accelerate your rankings.

For more information visit the W3C compliance site and the online ‘validator’.

N.B. don’t be alarmed if your site does not pass the test and appears to have a slew of ‘warnings’ or errors, this does not mean that it is broken or malfunctioning as these warnings are only relative to the ‘validator’s’ essential remit --- as above.

Making a large amount of seriously messy code comply with the W3C stipulations is a not really a job for those who are  unfamiliar with HTML, XHTML and CSS as much of the tweaking has to be done by hand even though good online ‘tidy’s’ are available. Embedding is another headache for W3C fanatics as the code provided by just about every embedded source from YouTube to Vimeo and Sound Cloud is seriously non-compliant and requires a completely different syntax but there are fixes and hacks --- more later.

O.W. 18th November 2009