Search Engine Optimisation Tips | C2 Web Design

The W3 Standard

You may have heard, or your website designer may have mentioned to you, about the W3 Standards.

The standards were introduced as a guide to designing a website not only using the correct and valid coding, but so that each and every web browser (e.g. Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, Opera, Mozilla etc...) each display your website in exactly the same way.

Internet Explorer does 'allow' many invalid pieces of code, whereas other browsers are more strict. This can mean that although your website displays perfectly well within Internet Explorer it may not display very well in other browsers - and as around 25% of visitors come from browsers other than Internet Explorer it is quite critical to get right.

Fortunately W3C offer a free validity checker, which will instantly look through your site checking for any invalid coding. Visit http://validator.w3.org and where prompted type in your website address. Within a few seconds you will either be told that your coding is valid, or that it is not valid (not transitional). It will also display to you the errors that appear on your website.

Now if you have a valid website then congratulations your website will be able to be viewed by all and the search engine robots will be able to navigate and 'pick up' your website a lot easier and efficiently.

If not it is always highly recommended to ensure your website coding is valid as the more valid your coding the easier search engines will be able to crawl through your site and capture each of your pages. By using invalid coding not only does this sometimes confuse search engines, but also confuse visitors when they arrive to your site and pages are not displayed correctly.

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