Search Engine Optimisation
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Can an optimised website have code which validates, and a ‘Bobby rating’?
An important SEO procedure involves the validation of a website’s coding against the appropriate World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard. The validation process highlights coding errors and instances of invalid mark-up. Some common coding errors, such as incorrectly nested tags and omission of closing paragraph tags, are tolerated by web browsers and spiders and will be indexed properly. Other errors, including the failure to close comment tags, result in pages being indexed incorrectly or not being indexed at all. Spiders do not behave consistently across the different search engines, so it is better to correct all coding errors picked up during the validation process.
In the case of invalid HTML mark-up, a more pragmatic approach is required. Some HTML tags are supported by all the major browsers, but have not been incorporated into the W3C specification. In most cases, invalid mark-up will be replaced with valid mark-up that achieves the same effect. Much of this mark-up is concerned with layout and has been superseded by the introduction of the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) standard. This allows precise results to be achieved in a cleaner and more SEO compliant manner.
Having corrected errors and removed invalid mark-up, it may seem strange to deliberately introduce non-W3C compliant mark-up. The reason for doing this is that some HTML tags have attributes relevant to spiders but not to web browsers and will therefore not be incorporated into the W3C standard. A good example of this is the link relationship attribute of the href tag, which gives greater control over how hyperlinks are treated by search engine spiders than either the robots meta tag or robots text file. The link relationship attribute is a powerful SEO tool used both to control the distribution of Google PageRank within the website via the site’s internal link system and to prevent PageRank leaking from the website via the external links. Using the link relationship attribute to improve search engine performance will result in mark-up which violates the W3C standard.
Bobby is a website accessibility scoring system adopted as a standard for measuring websites against the Website Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Achieving a AAA Bobby accessibility rating requires that the website’s code validates against the W3C standard. The website owner may have to weigh up the benefits of using invalid mark-up when deciding whether to adopt it at the expense of a Bobby AAA rating.
