Website coding standards exist for two main reasons; to maintain web development techniques across websites and to help usability issues for disabled internet users.
Coding standards like W3C are set by online authorities for websites to adhere to in order to make their coding easy to read. They were put in place as a general guide for websites everywhere to follow in order for web developers to make sites that were in line with each other. W3C was built as a consensus for web developers and by making your website meet W3C requirements suitable for your code, you help to make the search engines life easier to crawl your site
Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web 10 years ago and is still a director of the W3C organisation to help maintain it’s standards. This should give you some idea of the importance associated with W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) standards. The main reason for adhering to these standards lately is to help search engines read your website code in order to gain good rankings within search engine results pages.
By having a code approved by W3C that code is seen to be clean and therefore search engines like Google won’t have any problems trying to read the code and content included the webpage. If there are errors on the website then Google may miss out parts of the website causing SEO rankings to be lost.
From a web development perspective meeting coding standards helps other developers to be able to read or edit your code without too much hassle. For any business having a website built, it is essential that the code meets these coding standards.
The other part of coding standards are accessibility tests, including WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) which is to find out if your website is accessible enough for users. WAI aims to open up the internet to disabled users by getting websites to use coding techniques such as ALT tags on images which can be read out by machines to partially sighted or blind people.
There are different levels that you can clear your website to with WAI but the lower level is sufficient for SEO purposes and is not that much hard work for any experienced web developers.
Advansys are experts at building websites with advanced coding techniques clear to all major coding standards. Our website solutions can be customised to your every need and fully optimised to rank high on search engine results pages.
