Step up Your SEO by Sticking to Standards
Sorry for the overly alliterative title . . . sometimes I can’t help myself!
As a web designer, I feel it highly important to adhere as closely as possible to Web Standards. Doing this ensures that the sites I design will be visible to as many people as possible, across as many platforms and browsers as possible, on as many devices as possible.
But thanks to an article that Nate Whitehill pointed out, I recently discovered that using Web Standards is also very important for Search Engine Optimization.
Don’t get me wrong, valid code in and of itself won’t really help your organic search results all that much, but NOT having valid code could very possibly cause search engine crawlers to skip over some of your website’s important information, thus affecting your search engine rankings.
Also, if invalid code causes your website to be displayed incorrectly on certain browsers, then you may be losing a significant amount of traffic due to people leaving your site because it doesn’t look right. This alone could kill every bit of SEO work you’ve already done.
So that’s just one more reason I’m committed to creating fully standards-compliant code. After all, you wouldn’t want to miss out on some potentially search-engine-rich material just because your web designer was too lazy to validate his code, would you?