How To Make Your Website Comply With The W3C Standards?
The term W3C Standards is used a lot in digital marketing by SEO agencies and web developers, but not many people understand it or why it's so important. W3C standards can help search engine optimization a lot, which can be helpful for various businesses, such as improving SEO for solicitors.
The W3C Standards were developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international standards organization created by the man who founded the web. This organization formed the standards so that websites are as least imperfect as possible, which they believe will create long-term growth for the internet. This is done mainly by using proper HTML and CSS code according to W3C standards, which can help make your site user-friendly and profitable. A W3C-compliant website makes crawlability and performance much better, which helps websites from an SEO point of view. We will talk about how you can make your website compliant with W3C Standards.
Starting off
The first thing to do is to check if your website complies with W3C standards, and if it doesn't, then how many things do you need to change to do so. You can do this easily by simply submitting your web site's URL to the official W3C Validator tool to give you an overview of any errors detected. The errors, in this case, aren't mistakes but merely whatever part of your code is not compliant. Do not worry if you find too many errors pointed out by the validator tool, as it is tough to have a truly compliant website. This is because the W3C standards are extremely strict, and there is not much leeway in their standards. Once you have checked all the errors in your website, this is when you move ahead with other strategies.
The unrecommended approach
While it may be tempting to do so, especially after seeing so many errors in your website, we recommend not starting from scratch for creating your website. You may be wondering why because it seems a lot simpler to rebuild it cleanly. The reason is that this will result in a lot of your resources and time being taken up because a website takes a lot of testing, debugging, writing, etc. which can be costly. Furthermore, this approach can also lead to other problems like broken links.
The difficult approach
Another approach that you can do is to go through all the web resources of your website and run them one by one through validation software that checks your CSS and HTML code. In this way, you can use the results to clean up the code in your web pages. However, this approach can be tedious, especially if your website contains thousands of pages that can be very costly and resource-heavy. Therefore, we only recommend this approach if you are a small business with a website that does not have too many pages and is willing to put in the time and effort.
The recommended approach
Another approach you can take is a more efficient way of undertaking the previous approach we mentioned. The way this works is by identifying all the pages on your website which have the most traffic. Here is a checklist of what you should do:
- Make a list that starts with pages with the most traffic on your website so you can see your most important pages.
- Run these pages through the validator tool so you can see how compliant they are.
- Set a target for yourself. A small website can set a 0% error target if they wish, but a big website should realistically set an error target of at least 10%.
- Run the pages one by one through tools that can help you improve the CSS and HTML code. We recommend using the LogValidator software, but you can use whichever software you prefer as long as it gets the work done. Go through your list of most traffic web pages and get the error percentage down to your target.
This approach ensures that you get your most important web pages compliant, which will help boost traffic as users visit these more. In addition, this will also ensure that your resources are used efficiently, and you get maximum value from work done. Doing this consistently will slowly reduce the number of errors on your whole website until eventually, your website works fast and has excellent crawl ability, which will help you get at the top of search engine results. This will also keep visitors happy.
In conclusion
W3C Standards ensure that websites reach their maximum potential in terms of crawlability, which search engines give a lot of importance to. This makes it an essential factor to consider from an SEO perspective. You can make your website W3C compliant through the three methods we have listed, and you can choose whichever one suits your website and business. By making your website W3C compliant, you can reap the full benefits that come with it.
