Go to the main content - Jump to the sidebar

Why web standards and SEO go hand in hand

Written on February 12th 2008, filed under SEO, Web standards with 3 comments.

It seems like there’s a lot of misconception out there about what exactly web standards are and what they mean to Search Engine Optimization. Some people think its valid code; others think it’s an unreachable ideal and kick it aside as rubbish.

Before I can explain why web standards and SEO go hand in hand, I have to weed out any misunderstanding about what exactly web standards mean to me. Web standards are set of tools that were developed since the creation of our profession a little under two decades ago.

Web standards make life easier for front-end developers and users alike. This is what separates a “validated” site from a site that was designed with standards in mind. Validation is a tool but not a goal. To me a site follows web standards when:

  • It uses lean and clean code instead of divs and useless classes cluttering everything up.
  • It separates a page in three layers (content, style and behaviour).
  • A page is structured in such a way that when there’s no style or behaviour available; every element on the page still works and carries across some meaning.

Let me draw a parallel with Search Engine Optimization. When we optimize a site we try to:

  • Keep the code size of a page down so that we don’t have a high code to content ratio.
  • You do that by getting rid of all redundant classes or blocks, inline styles and scripts.
  • You give each element of a page some meaning by placing things like headings in heading tags and properly tagging each image with a descriptive alternative text.
  • All of this while making sure that JavaScript isn’t required to navigate the site.

Both are trying to use every technique at their disposal to reach a semantic web. This is why both standardistas and search engine optimizers are, or should be, so thrilled by the idea behind Microformats. These allow us to quickly name content, author and even weave a web of meta-data across different sites.

Both try to make life easier for all visitors, whether actual people or search engine spiders that are flying blind and can’t understand JavaScript (well). Web standards and SEO go hand in hand because what’s good for people is good for search engines.

3 Comments so far

Add your own

  1. JayAre - February 15th 2008 - 9:48

    Now all that still needs to be done is convincing designers that apart from a nice looking design it’s not a bad idea to produce nice looking code…

    Nice article!

  2. Stijn - April 10th 2008 - 14:37

    Interesting article, although I fear you are having a small problem with spambots this past week.

    You thing I always trie to consider in all my designs, is making sure you can safely navigate the site with images disabled. If all image have width+height and an alt-text attached to them, there should be no problem at all. What is your stance on this?

  3. Tim Ceuppens - April 11th 2008 - 15:39

    Thanks Stijn. I cleaned up the bots, looks like I need to add some form of protection against them…

Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.