22 Feb 2009 @ 8:21 AM 

What is this? Put in simple words, your website is written using a software language, usually HTML. Sometimes a web developer uses other scripting languages such as PHP or ASP. However your pages are always displayed as HTML code, which is “the” Web language.

As with any other programming language, the web designer or developer should write a clean and compliant code. By clean I mean a well structured code without clutter of any sort; by compliant I mean that the code must follow that particular language rules for coding. In the case of HTML, there is a consortium that decides about rules and it is called W3C or World Wide Web Consortium. They have an online validator for your code. Just look at one of my website’s pages: Affordable Search Egine Optimization. If you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you will see 2 icons on the left side. Clicking in the first of these icons, you will be redirected to the W3C validator and you can see a report for that page. You will also see that the page is 100% compliant with their rules. This means that my code follows all their recommendations. Why is this important in SEO? Because a page with a clean and good code can be “scanned” better by a Search Engine, this is why! Maybe this is not the primary factor to keep in mind when developing a web page, but, especially in the long run, it helps with Search Engine Optimization. Now let’s start a game. When you surf the Internet, try to check the compliance of websites you visit, even major corporations’ websites. You will be amazed by the sloppiness of these so called web developers! I believe that at least 90% of websites in the cyber space are not compliant. If you paid thousand dollars for a website that is not compliant, you wasted a good chunk of your money. It is like having a cute car, with nice technological features, but when you flip the switch of a side window, the trunk opens. Why should you settle for poor programming?

Clicking on the second icon, you will see that my website (or to be exact, the page you are examining) is also CSS compliant. What is CSS? CSS or Cascade Style Sheet, is a way to control the layout of your page. CSS helps you having clean and manageable pages and the code should be put as external file, not incorporated in your page (as I see too often). CSS’s are now used extensively, but guess what? I still see a bunch of not compliant websites!

Please note that in the new edition of my website this third icon was removed!

Finally, the third icon shows that my website is built without the use of tables, or technically tableless. Tables are often used in order to place elements of the page in a particular order. If you look at my home page, you will see that the page is visually made of 5 sections:

  • Header
  • Horizontal navigation bar
  • Body
  • Left navigation bar
  • Footer

In the past the only way to control this layout would have been through tables (which is part of the HTML code). Now you can do the same thing, using CSS. This save code and the flow of the page is more logical. Remember that a Search Engine does not follow the visual flow, but the code flow; for this reason it’s possible that the right navigation bar is read before the body, giving the body less relevance to the text included in it. Now, you should know that for Search Engines, content is king, and content is basically just text; this is why you should avoid like the plague Flash only pages. Also when Search Engines have to rank your page, they use only the first part of the text they can read. For this reason you risk to get high relevance to something almost irrelevant and little relevance to your content, which should be highly relevant.

Try to explain this to a web designer!!

Posted By: admin
Last Edit: 06 Nov 2018 @ 06:24 PM

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Responses to this post » (2 Total)

 
  1. admin says:

    I just changed the theme of my blog, and this one is very cool. Unfortunately this theme is not HTML (and CSS) compliant. This means that I have to work a bit to fix it, but I believe it worths the effort.

  2. admin says:

    Well I decided to design a theme all by myself and you are seeing the final version of it. By the way this theme is 100% compliant!

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