Or How to Build Your Site So Google Can Read It.
WWW standards compliance through a range of browsers and platforms ensures that your message gets to the most people possible and with a uniform experience.
The World Wide Web (W3.org) consortium’s standards keep your web strategy
“future proof.” Tools and format specifications stay in the public
domain which help your web strategy and content evolve transparently
and at a predictable pace.
Standards ensure that the most possible devices will be able to use your site.
Remember, you are not just serving pages to people. “Other than human”
represents a sizable percentage of your visitors. Machine parsed
content is required by everything from search engines, to cell phones,
language translators, and screen readers for the sight impaired.
Standards ensure that these computer agents can effectively make sense
of your valuable data, infer meaning, and deliver appropriate results
to their human counterparts.
Semantic layout and structure ensures that web indexing/searching services like
Google will understand not just the words, paragraphs, and phrases but
their relationships to each other.
If you lay out your page using a 3×3 table to achieve a particular look,
say a header, some body text in columns, and a footer, computer agents
may not be able to make sense of the data relationships among the
different table cells. Further, if you use font-size tags to size
headings, sub headings you convey no semantic information. You only
convey a look. By using h1, h2, em, p, and strong tags properly you
ensure that they convey meaning and structure to non-human agents
(bolded text makes little sense to a computer).
Results? To put it plainly, your web site will rank higher in Google.
Since the look or style of the site is independent from the data it contains,
you are free to redesign your site without the enormous expense and
effort of duplicating the data entry. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
support has reached nearly 100% saturation through its implementation
in all popular web browsers.
If a visitor does not have a modern browser, or CSS support is poor, your
site will be still be intelligible to them. When the presentation layer
breaks down, your data still has a semantic structure of its own, which
itself conveys form.
Flexible style sheeting allows for a complete site redesign without modifying content in any way.
