W3C Web Standards & SEO
Posted on August 15, 2007 by Ben Cecka
I’ve seen many discussions about whether abiding by W3C standards or not shows a better return on search engine placement and targeted keywords. There’s obviously going to be varied responses across the Internet on this, but my short answer is: Yes.
While search engines will pick you up regardless of content, by following standards and semantic HTML styles, your pages are going to be regarded as they are intended, not by a search engines best guess. Many websites don’t take full advantage of the power of the <title> and <h1> tags to explicitly tell engines what to expect within the page. The layout can certainly be pretty, but it should also follow a clean logic under the hood. A great way to test your site is to view it in a text only browser such as Lynx. See how well it degrades and you can quickly determine if a search engine will be able to make sense of your code.
There’s no silver bullet. No right answer. But, you’ll certainly set yourself up for success if you can at least validate on some level of HTML or XHTML (not to mention make changing styles a heck of a lot easier!).
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