Standards, Semantics and SEO

By Janine Dalton
Web Developer

What are Web Standards?
Web standards are a set of technologies established for creating web based content. They deal with structuring content (XHTML), presenting that content (CSS) and controlling how web pages behave (ECMAScript). If this all sounds rather technical, it is! Yet, the consequences of conforming to these standards are far easier to grasp. Designing with web standards results in web sites that are accessible to the greatest possible audience, cheaper to maintain and future proofed to cope with any new browsers which may emerge in years to come. You can check if your site makes the grade by entering your URL in the W3C Validator.

What does Semantic Markup mean?
In English, the word semantic means "of or relating to meaning". In the context of web development, the term semantic markup means using HTML as intended i.e. to give meaning to the content it formats. For example, surround headings with heading tags (<h1> to <h6>) and place paragraph tags around paragraphs. It sounds so simple and sensible. Yet the majority of web pages do not follow this logic. Instead, their source code reveals a tangled web of formatting tags and line breaks, which give little if any structural meaning to the web page content.

Why bother?
The ideals of web standards and semantic markup are all well and good in theory. However, if your website, like most, currently falls severely short without any major consequences to date, you may well be wondering why anyone would bother. In practice, there are all sorts of reasons why standards make sense and you can find out more by visiting the Web Standards Project. For the online marketeer, here are some major reasons why using semantically correct markup and designing with web standards could dramatically improve your search engine optimisation efforts.

The SEO benefits

• Web standards were designed so that older browsers can still understand the basic structure of web pages, even if they cannot comprehend all the modern bells and whistles. Search engine robots are essentially primitive browsers. Therefore, creating standards compliant web pages makes it easy for search engines to fully crawl your site.
• Currently, search engine spiders are not very intelligent. They crawl a web page and just see lots of words. However, if you use the correct HTML structures to mark up your content, search engines can make much more sense of it. For instance, by using a <h1> tag for the main heading you can give search engines a vital clue to the topic of your page. When a spider sees a <h1> tag, it recognises that it has found the most important heading on the page. Therefore, it attaches greater importance to keywords within this heading.
• Combining semantic markup and web standards leads to far cleaner code. This means faster loading pages with smaller file sizes. Crucially, your web page will consist of proportionately less code and considerably more spider-friendly, keyword-rich content.