The W3C…. has anyone her of them? Well they are one of five PageRank 10 sites on the entire internet. So what is the W3C or W3… They are the World Wide Web Consortium, developer of “interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential.” So why should we think of them as important? Stop reading NOW and click on over to your favorite site (open in a new window, of course) and then click “View” then “Source” on the menu bar of Internet Explorer ( “View” then “Page Source” in FireFox) Now look at the top line and what does it say….. Probable something like: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN”> Right? This is called the Document Type or Document Type Definition or DTD Statement. Not to get technical it basically says what type of document that page is. And the next line probably looks like <html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” lang=”eng”>. Again, declares what language and type of document. It also points to the place in the W3.org site that details that particular Document Type.
OK, so why is all that important? Because, in most instances, you should comply to their standards to get the most out of your site. Remember the search engines don’t “see” what you see. They “see” code, so in order for them to be able to “read” your site efficiently, they need a correctly “marked-up” site. If you can make it easier for the search engines to spider your site, don’t you think that they may hold your site at a higher value, or maybe visit you more often? Put it this way a valid marked-up site is like having a fresh clean white sheet of paper with Arial 12 pt black font, typed neatly, grammatically correct, and captivating. Compare that to a paragraph hand written by a fifth grader on a brown paper bag. Now which one do you want to read?
If your site is not coded so that the spiders can easily brows your site, then you are almost deterring them from coming back or even spidering your site to begin with. Properly encoding your site also ensures the future compatibility of your site.
As important as this is I would not stress to much over this. It is important to be considered valid, but its also can not be helped sometimes because of your CMS or your because of your WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) HTML editor you use. In these cases you can try to edit the code yourself, but don’t let it totally stop you from running your site.
There are tools to help you view, edit, fix validate your site. I have listed them below:
- W3C Markup Validation Service
- Info on Tidy
- Tidy FireFox Addon
- Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar
You can also use the validator to get the valid markup.
Click “Revalidate”, then Copy Paste the output code at the bottom of the page:
Now your site should be VALID. Once Valid you will be able to add the W3 Seal of approval on your site.
Authority seals have shown to drastically improve conversion rates. So their approval is two-fold. You code is valid and you get a seal to place on your site for conversion purposes.
Other useful W3 validators:
Whats been useful to you? Tell us about them here or post a comment below.
