Website Coding

[tuscaloosabum]

Look. I guarantee that the w3c compliance of your site's html has VERY VERY little (if any) to do with how well your site ranks for any given search phrase. I have many sites that I've personally written in notepad. My html is not perfect and it doesn't validate most of the time. But I get the bodies coming to my sites and they don't know (or care) if my html validates. But they do fill out forms and follow my calls to action. My sites are what you might call wordy (informative?). I call that giving yourself an opportunity to rank for another string. For goodness sake, Google's homepage validates to poop!!!! They don't care if your site's html is valid xhtml or broken up transitional junk. They only care about the content (information) that is on your site. Matt Cutts is right, just do things on your site to help the visitor and the rest will take care of itself.

If you want qualified bodies coming to your site(s), quit worrying about the structure of your html and focus on the SEO work.

Here's the short list

1. Fill your site with good quality content that people want to read.
2. Get some links to your site with good anchor text. (without paying for them)

That's pretty much it.

Other helpful things

• Learn some html tags like h1, h2, h3, b, strong, ul, ol
• Put a unique h1 on each page
• Make sure each page has unique title, description, keywords in meta
• Don't focus on making the site pretty until after you have good traffic
• Paragraphs are beautiful
• Rankings adjust slowly (a few months), don't give up, you can do it

Take it from somebody who's been there and done that. Spending time making a site validate is a GIGANTIC waste of time.

Hope my past wasted time and can be of value to you.

 

[Aaron_4SIGHT]

Spending time making a site validate is a GIGANTIC waste of time.

You know what's an even bigger waste of time? Fixing a site because non-valid HTML makes it break when new browsers come out. Google breaks the rules because they know exactly what they are doing.

I prefer to think of valid HTML as the cherry on the sundae. Sure, you don't absolutely have to have it, but it's a very nice bonus. And, if I might add, it's a bonus that our customers need not worry about as AgentMethods sites validate from the start.

 

[tryan326]

I think the key here is whether your website validates or not...the less errors in the code the better. Just because a site doesn't validate doesn't mean it won't work in newer browsers.

You could forget to close a few simple tags in your code or use a capital letters in your attributes or have 1 error in your code and fail validation. That wouldn't make your site non-compatible with newer browsers.

But really this should be handled on a case by case basis. There's no one-size fits all here.

 

[skeet64]

You should try to use valid or strict XHTML/CSS. Most important, though, is having frequent and useful content additions as well as good inbound links.

 

[jeremyeast]

I am not sure if you are completely right tusaloosabum (I am not certain if many people on earth are!) but certainly your points are valid on the other things except for the meta tag line as it just came out that these are not important from Lord Cutts himself. I in fact am going to work on my h1's right now as I have been a little liberal in handing these out come to think of it, and the originality of each one is something I certainly screwed up so thanks for the suggestion. I am not certain it will change my rankings and the main problem I have with seo is that you can do one hundred things a day and if your rankings change at all you won't know what did it or even why.
On the other hand I am not sure about the h1 tags (it could be like the keyword tag) and not that important. Perhaps one of the resident seo guys like mr. miller wants to weigh in on the value of headings tags before I end up chopping up my site due to one rookie seo poster.

 

[Pangaea]

I remember going to a Search Engine Strategies in early 2007 where Vanessa Fox (while working for Google) said that you don't need a website to be W3C compliant in order for it to rank well and I KNOW for a fact that's true.

The first website I EVER built ranked #1 for Chicago mortgages until 2007 (when I sold it) and it was built using Yahoo Sitebuilder and Flash (I know, sue me). When you ignore web standards you're going to run into cross-browser compatibility issues, but very few SERP problems. What's going on is the same people who care about W3C also care about inbound, one way links and unique-updated content. So when someone says "I'm ranking and I'm also W3C compliant", it's just a coincidence. They're ranking highly because of their efforts, not their code.

As long as the whole site isn't in Javascript or Flash and you have a decent link structure Google won't give you any special treatment than a site with the same exact design being fully validated.

Now, does that mean you should build with whatever cheap program you want and not worry about validation?

Not necessarily, I love KNOWING that every site I build will ALWAYS look the same in every browser. I just don't think people should lose sleep over it (and I won't if my site has 3 or 5 errors but still looks the same in every popular broswer), or try and complicate the reality of the situation.

P.S. I graduated from Yahoo Sitebuilder, I now build all sites with a CMS and write and design the templates in PHP 5, CSS, HTML, JS, Yada yada...

 

[dmiller90]

Most of you are correct, Validation of the code helps, but will not stop a site from ranking. But sites now that load fast and have modern coding will rank better, due to Googles new Algorythim (Google Caffeine) (Load Time is a Huge Factor) in sites ability to rank.) Modern Code, Fast Server!!

Heading Tags, H1 H2 and so on, define good structure and crawability for Search Engines, dont fool yourself and try to figure out the "Snake Oil Sequences" They are Dead!!!

 

[Alston]

I agree with Pangea.

I've heard that code validation doesn't have a big effect on SERP rankings often enough now and from enough valid sources to finally believe it.

Seomoz.com says that valid code has a very minimal (16%) correlation with rankings. So while it is not as important as links or title tags, it probably has some impact on rankings.

However even if it has 0% impact on rankings, isn't the bottom line how much money you make from your site?

If your code looks funky in Safari, Opera or on a cell phone you're losing business.

Granted visitors using those browsers or their cell phones are going to represent a small percentage of your visitors, but if you can get them to convert and not lose your visitors using IE and Firefox on a PC, why not take their money too?

If you can make your code look good in all browsers and devices, why not do it?

If you can get your code to load faster and reduce your bounce rate, why not do it?

Making sure that your code validates will cost you a little more and if you have minimal traffic, your returns will be low. However, if your goal is to build your site and have large amounts of traffic in the future, a 1% difference could be real folding money.

At that point you'll either have to deal with the fact that you are losing money every month or pay for an overhaul of your site which will cost you more money than if you made sure that your code validated right from the start.

Learning how to write good code is like learning how to follow the grammatical rules of English. It can take a while to learn all the rules. However, after you learn how, it won't take you much longer to write a sentence or a line of code than it did before.

 

[Guest]

If your code looks funky in Safari, Opera or on a cell phone you're losing business.

Wow. That is so true. I'm a Mac user and while we are probably only about 20% of the online market, we are a somewhat upscale part of that market.

I use Firefox on the Mac most of the time. Safari is good, but it has some javascript issues with some sites.

When I come upon a site (or business or ins. carrier) that pops up a screen saying "This site only works on IE 6 or better" I think to myself "Here is a company that simply does not 'get it.'" Why not put up a sign that says "You can only buy from us if you are a marathon runner."

Fortunately I don't see that as often as I used to but there are a few carriers I avoid because I can't easily use their website. (And some carriers, like Ohio National are so married to IE that for their webinars, they use a streaming protocol that only IE can "hear." I've written to them saying it would cost nothing to change it, but they basically told me to jump in the lake and drown! They told me they could care less about the tiny number of Mac-using agents out there. They have their choices... I have my choices. It's all good!)

I don't think you have to have a really fancy website to succeed in this biz (Lord knows mine is about as plain and ugly as can be) but you DO want it to render well in all of the browsers that your customers might use.

I happen to sell to an upscale market who LOVE their Macs (Yeah, it's a status thing to them) and I make sure that whatever I put on my website renders well in Safari, Opera, and FF on the Mac. (One of the best ways to do that is to avoid javascript as much as possible!) Another is to use a CMS foundation that is known for being browser-agnostic.

I'm using Wordpress these days but there are others that are just as good or better. Wordpress is simple and easy for a dinosaur like me to get up and running in a few hours. My site took all of 3 hours start to finish. Of course it's horrible... but it works quite well for what I use it for... to close the sale, not open it.

YMMV

Al
InsuranceSolutions123 Agency

 

[jeremyeast]

Alston makes a great point as I didn't realize that cell phones were generating traffic for me, and I put in a couple of lines of code and was blown away by how great the website looked on the iphone. I advise everyone to do so as this it most likely the future of the web