What is W3C validation and how does it affect SEO?
A website’s validation is determined by W3C, and this standard can help search engines better understand what your site is about. To be honest, the concept of W3C validation can seem confusing at first, but it will become easier to understand once you know what the different types of validation are and how to implement them on your own website! In this article, we’ll explain what is W3C validation means, how it works, and why W3C so important to SEO?. When you finish reading this article, you’ll be ready to start validating your own website!
What is W3C Validation?
W3C Validation, or known as W3C allows users to check HTML and XHTML documents for properly formatted markup. This tool is for those who want to validate their code, which should include all syntax rules and elements used in validating documents. W3C was created by a group of web development experts from around the world. It’s designed to help people create better websites and also helps programmers find errors that may occur with their code. The most common problem when using W3C is that it can sometimes take a long time to load. While some users may not mind waiting for results, others will become frustrated and leave your site before checking if your website passes or fails on any issues.
Why do you need W3C Validation?
No matter what your level of technical knowledge, you know that there are ways to trick search engines. Those ways have become more sophisticated over time, and you need to be on top of them if you want your website to rank high in Google or Bing. The easiest way to help avoid getting banned from search engines is by creating valid HTML code. Luckily, tools exist to help check whether your site is valid — meaning that it meets all of the coding standards set forth by organizations like W3C. When you’re submitting a new site for review, search engines will look at how well-coded your website is and use that as an indicator of how likely they are to trust your content — and include it in their results pages (aka SERPs). If you want to ensure that your webpages aren’t being flagged as spammy or hacked, then make sure they pass W3C validation.
How W3C Validation Works for SEO
Search engines often give preference to a site that uses standards-compliant coding. That’s one reason Google has been a strong proponent of HTML5. The new standard has become an industry favorite since developers can easily create high-quality web content with it. With W3C validation as an SEO tool, you can also improve your website’s user experience by ensuring cross-browser compatibility and accessibility for people with disabilities. Since search engines value those things too, you can score points for implementing them on your site.
Catch Missing Errors
Every web page with a form or an image has errors in it, no matter what browsers display. But these errors are invisible to users — they won’t notice that your site’s style doesn’t match up with its logic, or that all of your alt text is empty. To catch these errors, you can use one of two types of validators: checkers or parsers. And while syntax-checking tools like HTML Validator do catch some errors, they aren’t perfect at identifying others. So if you want to make sure everything on your site works properly, using both types of validators is ideal.
Prepare for Future Changes
In order to prepare for future changes to the web, as well as make sure your site runs smoothly even if changes are made, you’ll want to make sure that your site passes W3C validation. W3C (The World Wide Web Consortium) has created a set of standards used by web designers to create websites. Validation means that not only have you followed these standards but that those sites that run through the validator software have been found in full compliance with the HTML standard. By following these standards, you can prevent many potential issues down the road. It may seem like a lot of work now, but having a site validated will help keep headaches at bay in the future.
Look Professional
Unlike humans, search engines prefer websites that use validated HTML and CSS code. The W3C validator will tell you whether or not your website meets these standards. Generally speaking, it’s a good idea to run all HTML code through an HTML or CSS validator before deploying it to a live site. This way, you can be sure that your code adheres to standards and isn’t vulnerable to malicious hacks. We’ve been saying it for years: web developers should run their work through a third-party validator before deploying it on a live site. It’s important because there are hundreds of different browsers out there that have different levels of support for new features, like media queries or flexbox alignment.
Good Learning Tool
When we talk about WC3 validator and its importance in SEO, we’re talking about a simple HTML or CSS error checker that helps make things easier because more people understand HTML and CSS. If you have some coding experience or you feel confident enough to know when something goes wrong with your code, then you can skip on checking everything that seems valid. However, if you are not an expert and are still new to coding, there are more chances for errors to slip into your code because of web development tools. Most common errors such as missing closing tags, quotes around text, incorrect indentation, etc. will all be caught by the WC3 validator but only if they are done in HTML or CSS files.
Simplify Maintenance
An HTML validator, also known as a web validator or code validator, checks your pages for coding errors. A particularly useful online validator, the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Markup Validation Service (MVS), enables the creation of web pages based on widely used and accepted coding styles. It has been around since 2002, and there are plenty of different uses for it. If you’re a regular user of Google Chrome’s DevTools, you’ll notice that there’s a Markup Validation Mode under the Resources tab. This allows you to check any webpage using the MVS in real-time and see any errors right on the screen as you browse.
