What a lot of so-called web designers don’t know, or know about and don’t pay attention to is a set of best practices for building websites published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and promoted by the Web Standards Project (WaSP). Here’s what WaSP has to say on the subject:

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) , along with other groups and standards bodies, has established technologies for creating and interpreting web-based content. These technologies, which we call “web standards,” are carefully designed to deliver the greatest benefits to the greatest number of web users while ensuring the long-term viability of any document published on the Web.

The simple truth is that you can build web sites that ignore web standards and they will probably display just fine in most web browsers. A common conception is that if the page looks fine it’s not worth the extra trouble to make it standards compliant. That’s even true, as far as it goes. That is, it’s true if you don’t care about your search engine page ranking. Creating standards complaint page is more work, but cutting corners typically creates an inferior product. That’s true with web pages too.

Another truth is that Google prefers pages the are standards compliant and well structured. Since it’s most likely your website is a marketing tool, don’t you want it to actually work? To see if your pages are well are is a simple process. Just enter your page address in the W3C Validation Service page.

According to web marketing guru Michael Campbell fixing his site to W3C standards caused up to a 27% more of his pages to be listed in Google. Now that’s worthwhile.

The full text of his newsletter article has been re-posted in Brian Robinson’s blog.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 1st, 2006 at 7:18 am and is filed under Best Practices, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.