AKR Solutions

1. W3C Validation

If your site failed validation you may be struck with horror at the amount of errors the W3C validator has produced! Don't worry, many of the errors may be down to one element, so when fixing your pages, it is often a lot less painful than you think.

Why Validate?

Well, firstly there is the very practical issue that non-valid pages are (by definition) relying on error-correction by a browser. This error correction can and does vary radically across different browsers and versions, so that many authors who unwittingly relied on the quirks of Netscape 1.1 suddenly found their pages appeared totally blank in Netscape 2.0. Whilst Internet Explorer initially set out to be bug-compatible with Netscape, it too has moved towards standards compliance in later releases. Other browsers differ further.

The three questions below deal with three different points of view on the issue of Validation.

1. The novice (or non-technical website owner) question:

"My site looks right and works fine - isn't that enough?"

The answer to this one is that markup languages are no more than data formats. So a website doesn't look like anything at all! It only takes on a visual appearance when it is presented by your browser.

In practice, different browsers can and do display the same page very differently. This is deliberate, and doesn't imply any kind of browser bug. A term sometimes used for this is WYSINWOG - What You See Is Not What Others Get (unless by coincidence). It is indeed one of the principal strengths of the web that (for example) a visually impaired user can select very large print or text-to-speech without a publisher having to go to the trouble and expense of preparing a separate edition.

It is perhaps unfortunate that the best-known browsers - Netscape Navigator and MS Internet Explorer on Windows - are visually very similar indeed in their presentation of many documents, differing only in trivial details like margins and spacing’s. The "same" browser on a Mac or Unix/Linux display will often look far more different.

2. The perceptive observation

"Lots of websites out there don't validate - including household-name companies."

Do remember: household-name companies expect people to visit because of the name and in spite of dreadful websites. Can you afford that luxury?

3. The strawman argument
 
"Validation means boring websites, and stifles creativity"

This is simply head-in-the-sand ignorance (indeed, it lies at the heart of the most spectacular hype-filled dot-com failures). Validation is fully compatible with a wide range of dynamic pages, multimedia presentations, scripting and active content, etc. It is part of the difference between doing it right and doing it wrong in a dynamic multimedia presentation, just as much as in a purely textual site.

Further information can be found at http://validator.w3.org/about.html

2. SEO Score

How does a search engine view your web page? But more importantly how does the page look to a search engine robot crawling your website and how will it rank your website?

As well as being well formed and valid, your web pages must be informative and relevant, and this takes into consideration disabled users, for example there are a lot of third party tools available for users with impaired vision to use the internet, and these tools read web pages and produce sound from reading the text.

One such example is the use of ‘alt’ tags on images. These must be descriptive so that a person with impaired vision can understand what is on the website, ‘title’ tags on images produce a pop up tooltip text you see when hovering a mouse over an image, ‘alt’ tags provide a description of that image for visually impaired users. If these are missing, which is common, then this can lower the SEO score.

If the search engine can read your website efficiently then you have a great start, it then becomes necessary to create plenty of relative content, which is why a lot of websites use blogs and news feeds for example, to create a lot of relevant content, and improve indexing.

Lets examine the individual items on the report:

1. Website Title: This appears in the 'Title Bar' which is the blue band on the top of your browser, this text appears in the top left hand corner of every page and is used by search engines.
2. Title Relevancy: This is how relevant the words are in your 'Title' to the content on your site, a factor considered by search engines.
3. Meta Description: This is the introduction text that appears in the search engine listing when the results are displayed.
4. Description Relevancy: This is how relevant your description is to your content, a factor considered by search engines.
5. SEO Score: This is based purely on your content, links and the points above, the higher the better.
6. Terms: This is the amount of Terms in your web site and shows if they are linked to your content.
7. Images: A summary of your images including the all important 'alt' tags.
8. Links: This is the amount of links in your site, a high percentage of 'Outbound' links will lower your SEO score.

3. Link Checking

Link checking is important because it’s another example to a search engine that your website has up to date content, if the links are broken, then when were they last checked?
 
If you don’t have any broken links on your website, are the links that you do have relevant to your website content? and do they include any of your keywords?

1. Your website should be valid X/HTML and at the very least your home page, which carries the most weight with search engines, should conform to W3C standards.
2. Your title, keywords and content should relate to each other and should be relevant.
3. Every link on your site should work and be relevant to your content.
4. Your images should all carry ‘alt’ tags.
5. You should make good use of relevant content, create a blog, news articles or feeds that are relevant to your website content, one such method is the use of a good content management system (CMS), where you can add the content to the website yourself.

1. Providing a report summary on how best to use meta information (information about your site) within your site to enable search engines to effectively index your website.
2. Providing site visibility reports, we will provide information about how visible your site is on the four most significant search engines.  We can show you what position you are acheiving in each search engine for each of your keywords or search terms. A Search Engine Saturation graph shows how many pages in your domain are indexed by these major search engines. A Link Popularity graph provides information about how whether other sites with high visibility are contributing to your site visibility by providing indexed links to your content.
3. Providing a Trend report - This report shows exactly how you rank over time for each keyword and engine. The data is available in both graphical and tabular form.
4. Researching keywords for you is one of the most important things to do to ensure the success of your website, we can provide a report that will show what search engine page you will appear on by using certain keywords or a combination of keywords.
5. Providing Site submission, after your optimised pages have been uploaded to your web site, the next step is to submit them to the search engines.