How Does Conforming To W3C Standards Help My Marketing Plan?

You could improve your search rankings, help ensure cross browser compatibility, and get make sure your site loads faster - just by making sure your website follows current web coding standards. Does your site validate? You can check it here.

First, let me explain a little bit about the W3C. The W3C stands for "The World Wide Web Consortium." Basically, it's a bunch of website coding experts that get together and decide what the best coding practices are. The logic behind this is to create a uniform coding language so content in different web browsers look the same to everybody.

Get Better Search Engine Results

Search engines use a complex formula to determine how relevant a website is to the keyword a user searches. The higher the website's score, the higher it will be listed when that keyword is searched.

While a validated site does not directly receive any extra points in Google's scoring system, it does help the search engine spider to "read" your page properly. Sites that have messy code may be seen improperly by search engine spiders. Taking the effort to validate your site will ensure that you avoid making mistakes that can cause your site to rank poorly.

In addition, validated sites tend to have good structure - a quality that search engines do take into consideration when scoring your site. If you miss a structural tag on your site, it could still show up properly when you visit your web page. However, a search engine spider won't see the right structure which can hurt your site ranking.

Ensure Browser Compatibility

In theory, if you have a validated site, your webpage should have the same look and functionality on every web browser. This is important because if your site is hard to read or doesn't work properly in a user's browser, he's not going to buy from you. If your site does not load properly in FireFox, you'll lose 34.5% of your site visitors before they even read a word of text.

While theory is nice, the internet world hasn't quite worked out that way. Microsoft's web browsers (especially Internet Explorer version 6 and below) are notorious among web developers for not follow these coding standards. For now, we still have to use some "hacks" to get certain browsers to see a site the right way.

However, it seems like most modern browsers are finally starting to get with the program. Internet Explorer 7 is a step in the right direction for Microsoft browsers. It follows the W3C standard much more closely than previous versions of Internet Explorer. What did this mean for some business websites? This means that some invalidated sites that worked fine in Internet Explorer 6 suddenly didn't load up properly in the new version of Internet Explorer! However, validated sites had a much smoother transition into the new version of the browser.

As browsers get updated, they should start following W3C standards much more closely. Can you afford to have a week of downtime when Microsoft releases their next browser? While having a 100% validated site does not guarantee that your site will work properly in all browsers, it will ensure that you won't have to do a major overhaul to your website every time a new browser comes out.

Have you checked your site on all major browsers to see what it looks like? Does it load properly in all these browers? You can check for yourself.

According to W3Schools.com, the 7 most used browsers (in order of highest usage) are:

  • Internet Explorer 6
  • FireFox
  • Internet Explorer 7
  • Opera
  • Safari
  • Internet Explorer 5
  • Mozilla

You can take a look at the browser statistics here.

Faster Web Page Load Times

Web pages with fewer errors will load faster. In addition, validating your site will ensure you don't have any extraneous code floating around which will make the file sizes even smaller. While this probably won't make much of a difference for most people on broadband connections, it'll be appreciated by those who still live in the internet Stone Age and use dialup modems. (If this is you, please spend the few extra dollars a month for broadband. You'll thank me, I promise.)

Since today's world is getting more and more impatient, your website can never load fast enough.