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We came, we saw, we validated
By: Jeanette IuratoThe main international standards organization for the World Wide Web is known as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and its founder, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, is the man credited with inventing the Internet. The consortium was created to manage the standards of websites. Their guidelines are strict and purely based on "accessibility for all". Although only alluded to by search engines because their algorithms are proprietary in nature, it is widely agreed among professional website developers that following these guidelines will ensure a website's higher placement with the search engines. The W3C supports this belief, as well. Therefore if you wish to compete effectively on the Internet your business website needs to be written in source code that is W3C validated; one which is web compliant.
You can check a webpage's compliance with the W3C's free validation service at http://validator.w3.org. If the source code "validates" then the webpage complies with the W3C's guidelines. If it does not, the validation service will render the webpage's errors and warnings. Odds are your web developer did not follow these guidelines and so your website is neither cross browser nor cross platform compliant. Unfortunately this means a good percentage of your target audience can neither view nor navigate your website properly. To make matters worse, it also means your website may be deemed illegal in nearly two dozen industrialized countries with human-rights or disability-discrimination laws. These laws are often part of a specific policy aimed at reducing discrimination against individuals with disabilities.
You might ask, "If my page looks fine in Internet Explorer 7 why do I need to validate it?" If you're not interested in accessibility laws and you don't care if 89% of web users do not use IE7 you may not see a reason to worry. However, if you're concerned at all with search engine optimization (SEO), and there's no reason why you shouldn't be, validating your source code is a necessity. Search engine spiders are computer programs deployed by search engines to collect data from the Internet. Instead of focusing on visual display, they focus on source code functionality. Improperly formed elements, incorrect character data and unrecognized parameters are all errors in HTML code that might not affect your website's visual display in your favorite browser, but when it comes to search engine spiders it's a different story.
That doesn't mean that minor HTML errors will spell death for your search engine rankings. They will, however, disrupt the important process of a spider indexing your page and can even make some of that content invisible. Considering that so much of SEO depends on paying close attention to every little detail of your website content and source code, why leave the possibility open for search engines to experience problems when trying to index your pages? Validation might mean some big short term headaches when you set out to fix every last error, but the long term benefits of valid source code are clear and cannot be disputed by any professional within the web development industry. Contact us today for a free consultation. We promise to make the process of cleaning up your source code as painless as possible.
Copyright © Jendee Web Design Services, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Featured article on EzineArticles, also seen on Facebook.
About the author: Jeanette Iurato is a full-time web developer, freelance writer, ezinearticles.com contributor and the owner of Jendee Web Design Services, LLC. The www.jendee.net website is dedicated to helping small businesses on the Internet and those interested in getting started. You can follow Jeanette and share your thoughts at twitter.com/jendeedotnet.
You can check a webpage's compliance with the W3C's free validation service at http://validator.w3.org. If the source code "validates" then the webpage complies with the W3C's guidelines. If it does not, the validation service will render the webpage's errors and warnings. Odds are your web developer did not follow these guidelines and so your website is neither cross browser nor cross platform compliant. Unfortunately this means a good percentage of your target audience can neither view nor navigate your website properly. To make matters worse, it also means your website may be deemed illegal in nearly two dozen industrialized countries with human-rights or disability-discrimination laws. These laws are often part of a specific policy aimed at reducing discrimination against individuals with disabilities.
You might ask, "If my page looks fine in Internet Explorer 7 why do I need to validate it?" If you're not interested in accessibility laws and you don't care if 89% of web users do not use IE7 you may not see a reason to worry. However, if you're concerned at all with search engine optimization (SEO), and there's no reason why you shouldn't be, validating your source code is a necessity. Search engine spiders are computer programs deployed by search engines to collect data from the Internet. Instead of focusing on visual display, they focus on source code functionality. Improperly formed elements, incorrect character data and unrecognized parameters are all errors in HTML code that might not affect your website's visual display in your favorite browser, but when it comes to search engine spiders it's a different story.
That doesn't mean that minor HTML errors will spell death for your search engine rankings. They will, however, disrupt the important process of a spider indexing your page and can even make some of that content invisible. Considering that so much of SEO depends on paying close attention to every little detail of your website content and source code, why leave the possibility open for search engines to experience problems when trying to index your pages? Validation might mean some big short term headaches when you set out to fix every last error, but the long term benefits of valid source code are clear and cannot be disputed by any professional within the web development industry. Contact us today for a free consultation. We promise to make the process of cleaning up your source code as painless as possible.
Copyright © Jendee Web Design Services, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Featured article on EzineArticles, also seen on Facebook.
About the author: Jeanette Iurato is a full-time web developer, freelance writer, ezinearticles.com contributor and the owner of Jendee Web Design Services, LLC. The www.jendee.net website is dedicated to helping small businesses on the Internet and those interested in getting started. You can follow Jeanette and share your thoughts at twitter.com/jendeedotnet.
