Web Standards Compliant Markup for Better SEO

Once the SEO Copywriting of your site's content is complete, we'll recode your web pages so that the search engines better understand the relevance of your site's content for optimal indexing potential.

Sometimes referred to as "clean coding", web standard markup (HTML, or HyperText Markup Language) will amplify the effects of properly written copyrighting on search engine visibility. Visually, the pages of your web site will remain unchanged, however the source code will be completely rewritten according to web standards, for better search engine optimization.

Our SEO Services include all web standard practices that benefit search engine readiness - for today and for the future. Namely:

The separation of structural and presentational data in all Web Documents.
Semantic markup (HTML).
Code that passes W3C's strict validation requirements
Web pages that satisfy accessibility guidelines, including Section 508 and WAI standards

1. Structural, not presentational, HTML

Future Proof Clean Code for Long Term Web Presence

One of the most fundamental W3C Web Standard recommendations is the separation of structured and presentational data in documents for the web. Your web page's structure consists of semantically appropriate HTML elements that are embedded with text, images, and other mandatory data. The presentational data, which includes all visual content such as page layout, borders, fonts, colours, and backgrounds must be kept in a separate file which is encoded with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).

Semantically sound, strict web standards compliant mark up has profound, long term, positive effects on search engine optimization results.

Structured Markup For Longterm Search Engine Optimization Results

All your HTML documents may be styled using a single external cascading style sheet, containing presentational data for all the pages of your web site.

A few examples of the benefits gained by separating structured and presentational data:

Accessibility to wider range of viewers and user agents
Higher search engine results
Faster loading pages
Site wide visual consistency for usibility and branding
More efficient and less expensive site redesigns
Printer friendly pages
Future-proof internet documents

The W3C & Web Standards

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web

Web Standards are a set of specifications developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international group of over 500 member organizations devoted to the evolution of the web. Since it's inception in 1994, the W3C has published more than 110 standards (also known as W3C Specifications), including specifications for the basic coding languages of the web:

HTML (Hypertext Markup Languange) 4.01
XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language) 1.1
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) level 2

Founded by Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web in 1989), the W3C's mission is:

To lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web.

The compatibility of fundamental World Wide Web technologies allows for 'web interoperability', ensuring that the Internet will continue to thrive in the future.

Adhering to the web standard recommendations and best practices detailed on this will page have significant benefits on your web site's search engine visibility.

Tableless Layouts

In the late 1990s, when the internet was still primarily a medium to share textual information amongst academics and the military, browser support of CSS was poor. Designers, seeking ways to control page layout, began misusing borderless HTML tables in order to create invisible grids for the visual presentation of web pages.

Table Soup - Not on the top of the list for hungry search engine spiders.

Tables were never meant to be used for layout. Yet, because of a steeper learning curve, most web professionals refuse to learn to mark up even basic designs properly with semantic HTML and CSS positioning.

Some of the reasons tables should never be used for layout

They embed loads of presentational data into each page of your site
Larger file sizes
Higher ratio of presentational data to content
Expensive and labour intensive site redesigns
Difficulty in retaining visual consistency for site developement
Less accessible pages to humans, user devices, and search engines

Today's web browsers support the CSS specs well enough that there is no reason for the use of presentational markup exemplified by the bloated, nested, table soup that is still seen today.

2. Semantic HTML

HTML that helps the search engines better understand your content

Semantics are the very essence of HTML structure. While many web developers consider only the visual effect of a webpage, they fail to keep in mind that the search engine robots rely on the source code of the page for a better understanding of the content for indexing. Two pages could have the same content and be visually identical, with search engines having very different views on weighing the relavancy and importance of each document.

Semantically appropriate HTML elements should always be considered before choosing generic or unsuitable tags. The infamous use of tables for layout is yet again web standards enemy number one. Aside from the misuse of HTML tables creating presentational markup, semantically, tables are meant only for rendering tabular data such as spreadsheets, or any other data that belongs in a grid.

The type of content at hand should always be considered when choosing semantically appropriate html elements in order to lend meaning to datatypes such as:

Headings/sub headings
Paragraphs
Ordered/unordered/definition lists
Emphasized/strongly emphasized text
Tabular data
Addresses
Navigation
Hcards (HTML Vcards, or Electronic Business Cards)

Generic elements such as divs and spans should only be used when there exist no other semantically suitable tags for content, such as dividing sections for CSS positioning, in the case of page layout.

3. Strict HTML Validation

Checking the syntax of your site's source code

Ensuring that a webpage's HTML is free of syntax errors is one way to prevent coding problems from impeding proper search engine indexing. The source code of any web page may be easily checked for syntax errors with the W3C's online HTML and CSS Validators. If an HTML document is written according to web standard specifications, it will pass validation, otherwise it will fail, with errors displayed by the validator.

Online validation tools are available for both HTML and CSS, however, from an SEO standpoint we're concerned only with HTML validation, as poorly written HTML can potentialy have a negative effect on a web page's ability to be crawled by search engine robots.

For an HTML document to pass validation, it must conform to the basic mark up rules of the particular standards that the document is written for.

How HTML validation works

The doctype - the first line of parsable code in any web standard document, declares to browsers and validation tools which standards have been chosen to publish for.