What is Standards Compliant Web Design?
Web standards are guidelines for building websites using the most compatible and accessible methods. Using standards compliant methods ensures websites look the same regardless of browser or platform and give your web pages greater visibility in search engines. The structural information makes it easy for search engines to access and evaluate your content, and index more accurately.
Examples of Standards Compliant Web Design & Search Engine Optimisation
- XHTML & CSS validated by W3C.
- Semantic Markup - Programming and designing in a way both humans and machines can understand, with structure and definition.
- Content Vs Code - Ideally you want your content to make up for the majority of your page. By shifting design responsibility to external style sheets, your text is much easier for search engines to read. And when you come to redesign a page or website, your content and your design are seperate making the job much simpler & cheaper.
- Friendly URLS - Whenever you see a url with lots of strange code on the end like say domain.com?sid=6573&cat=oranges it's an example of an seo unfriendly url. A nicer way to format your URLs is by rewriting them, resulting in something more like domain.com/oranges. It makes it more readable, and helps search engines identify unique pages.
- A single domain - If you have multiple domains pointing to the same content, the ranking can be split between different domains. If you have more than 1 domain redirect it to your main domain of choice. And don't use both http://domain.com and http://www.domain.com as this causes the same issue. Redirect to whichever you prefer. Then every link to your site will use the same full domain, maximising the search engine position for that single domain.
