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Coding Standards for SEO

Every website is coded using a certain language and techniques to generate the wanted effect on the design of the site. The code of the website is what the search engines see when crawling your website rather than viewing the front end design that we see as users. It is essential that this code is build to meet coding standards to make it as easy as possible for search engines to crawl.

If there are errors within the code then search engines will have to skip that part of the code as they will be unable to read it. This can seriously effect the SEO results for your website as search engines like Google need to be able to read the whole thing in order to rank your site effectively in their database. If there are errors they may miss essential parts of your content that would improve ranking results.

The main coding standard is set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and their validator can help you determine if there are any errors in your code that need to be fixed. They will also detail what the exact errors are so you or your developers can get them fixed straight away.

W3C was started up 10 years ago by the inventor of the WWW Tim Berners-Lee and he still maintains his role in the consortium to oversee the new standards that are set for the latest coding languages.

If you are clearing your website to meet W3C standards you should ensure to select the correct level as appropriate to your website, otherwise you may need that errors do not match and cannot be fixed depending on how the code was written. Most websites will have a document header at the top of the code to tell the search engines which level you have cleared to so that they know in what language the Google Bot should then read the code in without coming across unnecessary errors.

WAI validation is another well known coding standard used by SEO companies to ensure that the site meets accessibility standards which are developed for internet users with disabilities. Usually you only need to clear your website to the first level of WAI compliancy which is required so that users can listen to what is written within an image alt tag if they cannot see the image itself. This is quite simple to do and is enough for most websites targeting the general public.

For more information on how to make your website easy to crawl for search engines and meet coding standards visit SEO Junkies who are experts at optimising websites. We have years of search engine optimisation experience as well as the knowledge to maintain a modern, attractive design whilst still being SEO friendly.

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