SEO : W3C Compliance

Search spiders are text only beasts - they don't read HTML. So why bother making your site comply with web standards?

Well in order to know where the formatting stops and the content begins, the HTML must be well-formed. Anything you can do to make the spider's job easier will result in a faster more efficient crawl.

Possibly in the future sites with malformed HTML might not be penalized, but might not be awarded bonus points for failing to comply with web standards.

Being compliant is good for SEO

Part of the process of making your site accessible is to make it traversable via a text browser (as used perhaps by someone with visual impairment).

So again we bring out the Lynx text browser to test our site, and check that it can be navigated by text and links alone.

And including keywords into ALT descriptions and comments is more content for crawlers.

	Do... use the accessibility tools in your web design tool (such as Dreamweaver) put a link to the markup validation service ( http://validator.w3.org ) in your global footer, which will help your ranking
	Don't... just ignore web standards - your ranking and your users will benefit from faster, leaner and more accessible code

validator.w3.org - validate your website for W3C compliance lynx.isc.org - Lynx text browser