Although web standards have been thrown to the wayside in the past, more and more people are seeing the benefits of adhering to them.  I am going to outline what web standards are and how they can be beneficial to you.

What are web standards?

In 1994, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was created to provide guidelines for web developers and the technologies that they use.  The W3C currently has around 450 member organizations, including, a big surprise here, Microsoft.

The W3C develops de facto standards to improve the way web related products interoperable between one another.  The groups within W3C try to gain consensus from all of the members of the organization, put together working drafts, and propose recommendations.  This process has been very successful at keeping standards relevant as well.  The usage and creation of web sites and content are very different than even 5 years ago.

How will I benefit from adhering to standards based design?

Faster load time for web pages

When you cut out all of the extra unneeded markup and redundant styling information, your pages load much faster and put less load on the server.  This will make your users extremely happy by improving load times.  No one likes a slow website.  They will just go to another competitor or a better site.

Simplified update of look and feel

Instead of changing code on every page of your site, you can easily change the entire look and feel of your site easily by using cascading style sheets (CSS) and changing only one file.  This ability has certainly changed web development forever.

Increased separation of code and content

Instead of adding styling code and other non standard code into your standard markup, you can take all styles information and dimensional information and pull it out into stylesheets, therefore making both your styling and HTML markup much easier to read and modify.

Decrease bandwidth and the space needed on your server

By taking out redundant code and repetitive styling information, you can drastically reduce the size of your site.  This is instrumental in very large sites that have thousands and thousands of pages.

Improved accessibility to all browsers and other Internet devices

You want to hit the largest audience possible, and by adhering to standards you will be doing that.  This is especially important for individuals with disabilities.  It is much easier for screen reader technology to read through content if there are not extra tags and styling information inline in the page.

Adhering to standards lowers costs

This one ties into almost all of the prior reasons.  You save money on servers because of less bandwidth costs, your code is easier to maintain, and updates are faster.  You will save money by following standards.

I hope that you call can see the benefits of adhering to web standards and start using it in your site.  It becomes second nature when you start using them.

Comments (11)
Tags: w3c | Categories: Accessibility

I could have added a top 10 list, but really there are 2 major things that improve how well your site does in a search engine.  In the past, web developers would use any means necessary to get their results at the top of the list, know as "Black Hat Search Engine Optimization."  This would include repeating phrases, or creating invisible text to try to game search engine relevancy.  These days, search companies like Google have gotten more intelligent in the way they index content and determine relevancy of content.

Google has a ranking system called Page Rank that uses extremely complex algorithms to determine relevancy.  Although they will not give away too many details of their algorithm (for fear of everyone gaming the system), they do give you guidelines to improve your site to make it more search engine friendly.

Quality Content

Cut the fluff, and write quality content for your site.  A lot of web design companies are guilty of adding fluff to their content and also to their client's content.  People want to read about your product or service, not read every buzz word known to man.  Search engines care about the quality of your content, and how it can help others to increase their knowledge as well.  Fluff and marketing mumbo jumbo does not do that.

Referral Links

Your site looks pretty darn important when thousands of sites are linked to your content.  Search engines see these links and determine your content as very relevant to a large number of people, hence see it as quality content.  Social networking sites are so incredibly successful because they have tons of links, and thousands of people link to them.  

There are hundreds of other factors that can affect your site's search engine results, but I thought I would mention the top 2 that really matter to companies like Google.  Change these 2 things, and you will see yourself increasing your relevancy to search engines, improving your search engine rankings, and ultimately driving more traffic to your site.

I hope you enjoyed this brief SEO article.

Comments (6)
Tags: search engines | Categories: Content