Things to know before you make your site live for Search Engine Optimization

Websites should be verified and fixed before bringing them live. While designing or developing websites you uses HTML and other dynamic languages, let us neglect server side scripts   but HTML has a vital impact in your ranking. As HTML is used for the user interface and they might not be in standard and many browsers do not complain against this issue but "What’s wrong is always wrong". Therefore HTML syntax is vital, many SEO experts and SEO companies are also known about this issue and they verify their task with W3C standard before bringing them live.

 There are various reasons to verify our websites before hosting it over the internet and below are some of the peak points for explaining why it should be done:

1      Quality of webpage depends on the written protocol and standard that you follow, moreover webpage should be syntactically correct at the time when it is written and should pass all the quality gates and be attested twice before it’s brought live.

2       While search engine crawls for your web page content, it might get confused if HTML tags aren’t in proper standard and protocol now if it is so then indexing cannot be in efficient and impacting manner.

3       Many HTML tags might be used while we code webpage’s and there might be some tags that are depreciated to which many of the search engines don’t support them. Hence, validation is important before bringing them live.

What is W3C Compliance?

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has provided guidelines and these standards should be followed while coding websites, webpage and documents. Below are some rules  by W3C described in short,

Rules for W3C Compliance

1.       Use XHTML declaration statements to start every XHTML page as follows:

                   <! DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 strict//EN” “DTD/xhtml- strict.dtd”> 

2.       Every tag must be closed.

3.       The head and body tags are now mandatory.

4.       Empty tags get a terminating slash. An empty tag is a tag that doesn’t require an end tag.Example include <br> and <hr> therefore now,

 <BR> is now <br/>   
 <HR> is now <hr/>   
 <IMG SRC=”--”> is now <img src=”--”/>

5.       The <pre> tag should not contain: img, object, big, small, sub, or sup.

6.       Any use of CSS should be in all lower- case letters. Example: #body{ background-color:red } instead of Body{Background-Color:red}

7.       All tags must be lower-case these doesn’t apply to attributes only tags.

 <FONT color=”#ffffcc”> This is invalid    
 <font color=”#ffffcc”> This is valid    
 <font color=”#FFFCC”> This is valid  

8.       All the attributes values should be included inside the double quotes.

9.       Tags should not be nested.

 <b><i> Text</b></i> This is invalid.   
 <b><i> Text</i></b> This is valid.

10.   The <pre> tag should not contain: img, object, big, small, sub, or sup.

11.   One <form> tag should not be inside another <form> tag.

12.   Any use of CSS should use all lower- case letters.