Search Engine Optimisation FAQs
Can an optimised website have code which validates and a ‘Bobby
rating’?
Validating a website’s coding against the appropriate World Wide Web Consortium
(W3C) standard is an important search engine optimisation procedure. The
validation process will highlight coding errors and instances when invalid
mark-up has been used. Web browsers and search engine spiders are both remarkably
tolerant of common coding errors, such as incorrectly nested tags and the
omission of closing paragraph tags, and these are unlikely to affect the
ability to render or index the page. However, some apparently trivial coding
misdemeanours, such as the failure to close comment tags, can result in
pages which either cannot be indexed by search engine spiders or are indexed
incorrectly. Spider behaviour is not consistent across the different search
engines and it is therefore preferable to correct all coding errors which
are picked up during the validation process.
A pragmatic approach is required in the case of invalid mark-up. There are some HTML tags which are supported by all the major browsers, but which have not been incorporated into the W3C specification. In the majority of cases invalid mark-up will be removed and replaced with valid mark-up which achieves the same effect. Much of this invalid mark-up is concerned with page layout and has been superseded by the introduction of the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) standard, which allows more precise results to be achieved in a manner which is both cleaner and search engine optimisation compliant.
Having corrected coding errors and removed unnecessary invalid mark-up from the website, it may seem illogical that there are occasions when it is beneficial deliberately to introduce mark-up which is not in accordance with the W3C standard. Some HTML tags have attributes which are honoured by search engine spiders but which are not relevant to web browsers and are therefore unlikely ever to be incorporated into the W3C standard. A prime example of this is the link relationship attribute of the href tag, which gives much greater control over the manner in which hyperlinks are treated by search engine spiders than either the robots meta tag or robots text file. The link relationship attribute is a powerful search engine optimisation tool used both to control the distribution of Google PageRank within the website via the site’s internal link system and to prevent PageRank leaking from the website via external links. Use of the link relationship attribute to improve search engine optimisation performance will, however, result in website mark-up which does not validate against the W3C standard.
Bobby is a website accessibility scoring system which has been adopted as a standard for measuring website accessibility against the Website Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). One of the prerequisites to achieve a AAA Bobby accessibility rating is that the website’s code validates against the appropriate W3C standard. Clearly, a website owner may have to make a choice between the benefits of using invalid mark-up for search engine optimisation purposes and obtaining a Bobby AAA rating for the site.
