What is W3C compliance?

Essentially, it’s a set of guidelines the World Wide Web Consortium set out the best practices on coding (machine language) HTML and CSS. The importance of W3C compliant source code?

There are many benefits to making a W3C compliant website. There are two main categories that will be affected, the users experience and the search engine spiders. Firstly it will make the website more accessible to a vast number of diverse people (for example people with disabilities). By making the website compliant, it will give the website cross browser effectiveness. Which means the website will be displayed in roughly the same way to all users viewing the site, which will show quality, accuracy and consistency of the website. This includes not just PCs and laptops but also hand held devices such as mobile phones and PDAs.

In addition to the above benefits, the W3C compliance may perhaps help out with higher search engine rankings; otherwise know as SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Due to the fact that Google’s algorithms (as well as other search engines) are confidential, it is difficult to know if it would 100% affect the search ratings. It does not seem to be the most important aspect, as we do see sites that do not comply also ranking well. With all SEO techniques, on their own they do not seem to make much of a different by only applying one at a time, the techniques must be combined.

By complying with the guidelines, it will assist the website to be crawled by search engine spiders (or “crawlers”) with no interruption; they are able to make perfect sense of the coding language provided. This will help reduce the amount of code, and therefore will increase the amount of content, keywords and phrases relating to your website that the spiders will crawl.