W3C Compliant Web Design HTML
One of the many elements that Google assess before determining your search engine rankings is the structure and quality of your html code.
Clean code loads faster, performs better and demonstrates to Google that your website is well managed and those signals are important for your search engine rankings.
Why Is W3C Important?
The World Wide Web Consortium was established in 1994 to establish and develop a set of universal protocols that govern the set up, accessibility & ease of viewing.
The core guideline criteria govern;
- accessibility for disabled users
- browser compatibility
- device compatibility
- fast download speeds
- ease of navigation
How To Validate Your HTML Code
The easiest way to check your page html code for compliance is to go to https://validator.w3.org/ and enter the page URL of the page you want to validate.
You will see a list of errors applicable to your page, along with recommendations to fix the errors. You should work through each one at a time, carrying out the code changes. Once you have updated the code you can re-validate the code.
One you have fixed all of the errors your page URL will return a validation message indicating that your page is fully compliant.
W3C and SEO
There is a great deal of debate about whether making your website W3C compliant will improve your search engine rankings. Search engines undoubtedly use W3C as a part of their ranking algorithm, but it isn’t a magic elixir that will dramatically improve your rankings.
What it will do however is prevent your website from incurring any search engine penalties for having low quality code. Google ranks websites by comparing them with their competitors. Your site needs to be as good as or better than the site ranking near you in SERP’s.
Having a W3C validated website will ensure that you are not penalised for any accessibility or load related issues.
If you want to rank at the top of Google for competitive search terms, you should aim for excellence in all areas of your site build, design and content.