The Science of Compliance: Does W3C influence search engines

Does your website comply to W3C? More to the point does your website need to? There are lots of people who hang on the mass of buzzwords that surround anything that's remotely Internet. The question being is W3C just another hot topic with little real grounding? With SEO becoming ever more important, many are suggesting W3C may hold part of the secrete to improving search indexing and in turn rankings. W3C has been around for a while and has roots that are firmly set at creating a set of standards from which the Internet can grow. Although it's been evolving since 1994 it's only over the last 2 or 3 years or so that W3C has entered more mainstream discussions concerning site design and SEO.

Some SEO's suggest failure to comply with W3C will turn search engines off of the job of indexing a website. Some of this is either SEO's purposely over complicating their roles or simply not fully understanding the reality. Evidence tends to suggest that all but the worst errors are dealt with by most of the big search engines and therefore the vast majority of websites will get indexed without any real problem. If there is any doubt then perhaps the W3C code validator is a good place to start. The idea being so long as everything is successfully parsed there's a good chance the site will the indexed by engines. Having said that, there have been occasions when every conceivable website seems to fail in one-way or another, even the big ones. If the likes of Microsoft, Dell and even Google fail quite so cataclysmically, it could be surly be argued that it's perhaps not worth putting too much emphasis on validation at all.

A lot of W3C revolves around the process of designing websites while keeping the visually impaired users in mind. The truth however, is those Browsers such as Lynx and Jaws tend to view a web page in a similar way to search spiders in any case. The best approach for the time being at least is to keep W3C and the World Wide Web Consortium's standards in mind and begin to clue up on the requirements. To get too hung up on compliance at the moment could saddle a designer / SEOer with an awful lot of hard and unnecessary analysis that'll bring little advantage. As the Internet moves forward many are predicting that W3C will become more of a plus point with search engine ranking. Therefore moving gradually to compliant standards could be a positive strategy, but possibly a long-term one

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Paul Coupe is lead designer / developer with Zoom Online.
Zoom Online is a UK based specialist web design company providing total online solutions.
paul@zoom-online.co.uk
http://www.zoom-online.co.uk/e-marketing/The_Science_of_Compliance_Does_W3C_influence_search_engines.htm