In Search Engines, Web Standards and Semantics Rule
Posted by on December 05, 2005 at 12:54 PM
Not adhering to web standards is like rollerskating down the freeway. You might get to where you’re going, but it’s inefficient and fraught with peril.
Over the past few years there has been a large underground movement to unleash web standards and semantics on the world by means of clean, well-formed markup. I say underground simply because unless you work in the web arena, you probably aren’t even aware that such a large movement exists. There are literally thousands of sites out there dedicated to web standards, and a line is being drawn in the sand. It’s time for web designers to earn their keep—either adopt standards and best practices for web development, or stop calling themselves web professionals.
Why the paradigm shift? Why should my corporation care what the page markup looks like? Because search engines do. They care so much that they have dedicated teams of programmers who do nothing but define meaning between elements on a page, developing algorithms to assign rank and value to each and every element of each and every page on the internet. Of course, there are other benefits to building sites with web standards—maintenance, accessibility, bandwidth reductions, etc. But the real value of web standards for businesses comes in the form of search engine results pages.
- se·man·tic (adj.)
- 1. Of or relating to meaning, especially meaning in language.
Well-structured semantic code is critical to the online success of any business. If the search engines can’t understand your content, what chance do your customers have of even finding your site among the billions of other pages out there? Your content will not be read, your page hits will fall, and your online presence will suffer. There’s a good reason sites like AT&T.com, C|NET.com, and even Amazon.com are adopting web standards.
We’re not in 1995 anymore. Muddled, confusing, obfuscated, or jumbled markup are no longer acceptable means of hashing out a web page. Designers accustomed to building entire sites in WYSIWYG editors like Dreamweaver are going to be living on the street once their web publishing methods are weighed against online performance. It’s time to get in tune with reality: either get up to speed with web standards, or watch your online presence go the way of the buffalo.
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Best Practices
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Comments (6)
Posted on December 7, 2005 09:48 AM
A good article, I did not think on the importance of webstandards before reading your article
Posted on December 9, 2005 11:00 AM
Very interesting article! Many tools such as Netobjects Fusion will need to take this into consideration.
Posted on December 9, 2005 05:37 PM
When creating the web medium, it should have been done in a language that had 'semantic' and rules in it. That way every site followed it no matter what. But then if every site followed the 'rules', how would you determine the rankings? Currently the 'rules' are determined by the search engines and not passed on to us directly, just by leaked press releases and experimentation. It's fuuny how so late in the game, someone wants standards.
Posted on December 9, 2005 06:09 PM
There are tools like Check My Code for NetObjects users to help make their code compliant, so I think that's a big step forward. W3C Compliance is definately important for all website developers.
Posted on December 13, 2005 08:11 AM
Boris --
If everyone followed the rules of semantics and web standards, then the search engines wouldn't have to try so hard to separate junk markup from content.
As of now, search engines are responsible (partially) for bringing standards and semantics into the lime light. A semantic web site will position higher in the engines than one that isn't.
There was no way at the birth of the internet to know exactly what would be needed in terms of tags and markup to allow for standards and semantics, so you can't fault anyone for lack of foresight.
If everyone followed the rules, ranking would be determined by content -- not how many hidden div tags you have packed into your site.
And that's the real notion behind web standards, search engines, and most modern web technologies: content truly is king.
Posted on December 5, 2005 02:27 PM
Couldnt agree more. The web standards gospel is often a tough sell in large corporate environments. Your article helps with the sell. So thanks!!