W3C Validator: What It Is & Why It Matters For SEO
- SEO |
A new article on Search Engine Journal reports that the W3C validator ensures cross-platform compatibility and accessibility through correct coding best practices.
ou may have run across the W3C in your web development and SEO travels. The W3C is the World Wide Web Consortium, and it was founded by the creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee. This web standards body creates coding specifications for web standards worldwide. It also offers a validator service to ensure that your HTML (among other code) is valid and error-free. Making sure that your page validates is one of the most important things one can do to achieve cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility and provide an accessible online experience to all.
Invalid code can result in glitches, rendering errors, and long processing or loading times. Simply put, if your code doesn't do what it was intended to do across all major web browsers, this can negatively impact user experience and SEO.
W3C Validation: How It Works & Supports SEO
Web standards are important because they give web developers a standard set of rules for writing code. If all code used by your company is created using the same protocols, it will be much easier for you to maintain and update this code in the future. This is especially important when working with other people's code.
If your pages adhere to web standards, they will validate correctly against W3C validation tools. When you use web standards as the basis for your code creation, you ensure that your code is user-friendly with built-in accessibility. When it comes to SEO, validated code is always better than poorly written code.
According to John Mueller, Google doesn't care how your code is written. That means a W3C validation error won't cause your rankings to drop. You won't rank better with validated code, either. But there are indirect SEO benefits to well-formatted markup:
Valid code helps translate into better cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility because it conforms to the latest in W3C standards, and the browser will know better how to process that code. This leads to an improved user experience for people who access your sites from different devices. If you have a site that's been validated, it will render correctly regardless of the device or platform being used to view it. That is not to say that all code doesn't conform across multiple browsers and platforms without validating, but there can be deviations in rendering across various applications.
Common Reasons Code Doesn't Validate
Of course, validating your web pages won't solve all problems with rendering your site as desired across all platforms and all browsing options. But it does go a long way toward solving those problems. In the event that something does go wrong with validation on your part, you now have a baseline from which to begin troubleshooting. You can go into your code and see what is making it fail. It will be easier to find these problems and troubleshoot them with a validated site because you know where to start looking. Having said that, there are several reasons pages may not validate.
ou may have run across the W3C in your web development and SEO travels. The W3C is the World Wide Web Consortium, and it was founded by the creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee. This web standards body creates coding specifications for web standards worldwide. It also offers a validator service to ensure that your HTML (among other code) is valid and error-free. Making sure that your page validates is one of the most important things one can do to achieve cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility and provide an accessible online experience to all.
Invalid code can result in glitches, rendering errors, and long processing or loading times. Simply put, if your code doesn't do what it was intended to do across all major web browsers, this can negatively impact user experience and SEO.
W3C Validation: How It Works & Supports SEO
Web standards are important because they give web developers a standard set of rules for writing code. If all code used by your company is created using the same protocols, it will be much easier for you to maintain and update this code in the future. This is especially important when working with other people's code.
If your pages adhere to web standards, they will validate correctly against W3C validation tools. When you use web standards as the basis for your code creation, you ensure that your code is user-friendly with built-in accessibility. When it comes to SEO, validated code is always better than poorly written code.
According to John Mueller, Google doesn't care how your code is written. That means a W3C validation error won't cause your rankings to drop. You won't rank better with validated code, either. But there are indirect SEO benefits to well-formatted markup:
- Eliminates Code Bloat: Validating code means that you tend to avoid code bloat. Validated code is generally leaner, better, and more compact than its counterpart.Faster Rendering Times: This could potentially translate to better render times as the browser needs less processing, and we know that page speed is a ranking factor.
- Indirect Contributions to Core Web Vitals Scores: When you pay attention to coding standards, such as adding the width and height attribute to your images, you eliminate steps that the browser must take in order to render the page. Faster rendering times can contribute to your Core Web Vitals scores, improving these important metrics overall.
Valid code helps translate into better cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility because it conforms to the latest in W3C standards, and the browser will know better how to process that code. This leads to an improved user experience for people who access your sites from different devices. If you have a site that's been validated, it will render correctly regardless of the device or platform being used to view it. That is not to say that all code doesn't conform across multiple browsers and platforms without validating, but there can be deviations in rendering across various applications.
Common Reasons Code Doesn't Validate
Of course, validating your web pages won't solve all problems with rendering your site as desired across all platforms and all browsing options. But it does go a long way toward solving those problems. In the event that something does go wrong with validation on your part, you now have a baseline from which to begin troubleshooting. You can go into your code and see what is making it fail. It will be easier to find these problems and troubleshoot them with a validated site because you know where to start looking. Having said that, there are several reasons pages may not validate.
