WC3 compliance in relation to SEO

[Steve-H]

Hi

I think this is the best category to post this in?

Our new site has just gone live and when I asked the design company to implement the site optimisation, submit to search engines etc I received the following reply ......

"we have revamped our Search Engine Positioning Service as recent changes by Google considerably changed what was required for a website to perform effectively in the top search engines. In your case, to begin to make it effective we need to rewrite all of the underlying HTML code on the main website pages so that it complies with the WC3 standard. This is approximately 25 hours work. This is simply the start of the new optimisation process with much more work to be done on an ongoing basis."

25 hours work is going to be close to £2k and before I go back to the Designer I wanted to find a few things out -
1) Is rewriting the code to WC3 standard going to improve SEO? I did not think this was a factor of search engine algo's.
2) If we leave the code as it is at the moment (we still need to add in tags for keywords, robots and descriptions) is this going to hinder SEO
3) Is 25 hours work a realistic time scale for this site. It does not have that many pages and most pages are secure so do not need to be WC3 compliant for search engines benefit.

The website can be found at this Platinax post (I don't want the actual site directly linked to this comment) - http://www.platinax.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?t=2288

This site has been a year in the making when it was only supposed to take 2 months. The design company seriously under estimated the complexity of the programming behind the site!

I am rather peeved that the design company has made the above statement as they should have designed the site to be compliant anyway but that is another issue.

I just want to make sure the design company is not trying to claw back some of the losses they made on this project before I decide what to do next.

Your input is much appreciated.

[maslow]

Hi Steve

Have replied to your other post so I'll respond to this too.

In answer to questions 1 and 2 the answer is yes and yes. W3C compliance is an essential for good seo. The bots only see html and if they can't read it they can't index it.

Having said that there are not so many issues if you run the index page (default.htm) through the validator, but multiply that by the number of pages in total and it could take a while to fix. I haven't put more than that one page through but 25 hours looks maybe a bit high, but can't comment more than that on question 3. Are you aware that only the agents area page is secure?

Jim

[Brian Turner]

Steve, sounds like it would be a massive waste of £2k, IMO.

I'll try to answer your questions:

Originally Posted by Steve-H

1) Is rewriting the code to WC3 standard going to improve SEO? I did not think this was a factor of search engine algo's.

Absolutely not. WC3 validation has nothing to do with SEO - try running Yahoo.com or Google.com through a validator as well - they fail miserably.

Google wants to be the information center of the internet - it doesn't discriminate against pages simply on the basis of W3C in my opinion.

Originally Posted by Steve-H

2) If we leave the code as it is at the moment (we still need to add in tags for keywords, robots and descriptions) is this going to hinder SEO

Ideally, CSS would be used to ensure that your main content would be positioned higher in your page template. However, it is not essential for general sites. Very competitive markets (finance, property, etc) then it should be recommended. But for

Originally Posted by Steve-H

3) Is 25 hours work a realistic time scale for this site. It does not have that many pages and most pages are secure so do not need to be WC3 compliant for search engines benefit.

Not sure if it's a reasonable timescale, but:

Originally Posted by Steve-H

This site has been a year in the making when it was only supposed to take 2 months. The design company seriously under estimated the complexity of the programming behind the site!

Not only does the delay sound very unprofessional, but looking at the site, they've dumped a lot of information in images, made basic errors on the CSS, and also effectively just built the internal pages as text-only pages. I'd feel burned if I'd spent money for the design. Sorry, that's my honest opinion.

Personally, I'd simply cut my losses with this company, and if on-page SEO and CSS accessibility is an issue, then I would definitely take it up with another company.

I had Platinax redesigned in CSS (not uploaded as yet) by David at Randall Designs - it's certainly worth asking him for a second opinion.

[Steve-H]

I appears there was a misunderstanding regarding who is paying for the above mentioned work. The design company are doing this at their own cost so I can chill out now. They were merely highlighting the time it would take rather then telling me an invoice would be on its way, phew!

I agree with you Brian that the Search Engines do not give any weighting to WC3 sites. The design company however think otherwise and it can't do any harm. They will be doing the CSS work which you say helps with SEO.

Jim, the agents page should not be secure so thanks for highlighting this. The site only goes secure when a user wants to register a company or an agent logs in to the admin area.

Thanks for your input.

[maslow]

Originally Posted by Brian Turner

Absolutely not. WC3 validation has nothing to do with SEO - try running Yahoo.com or Google.com through a validator as well - they fail miserably.

Google wants to be the information center of the internet - it doesn't discriminate against pages simply on the basis of W3C in my opinion.

Part of the validation process though is use of images and so the alt tag. Isn't this a valuable asset in seo terms?

Jim

[Brian Turner]

Oh, certainly there are issues that will help - after all, to some degree SEO is nothing more than a focussed extension of accessibility issues in the first place.

My reply was simply on the question as to whether W3C validation is required for good rankings, which it really isn't. My apologies if that answer came across as a bit strong - it wasn't my intention to be seen to be aggressive with the reply.

Really good content development SEO's will almost certainly use a lot of CSS in their pages these days, especially for placing content higher up the page hierachy when spiders view the basic page information, and issues of accessibility would be a definite concern these days for new sites - I have a CSS-only version of Platinax ready to upload once I modify all of the templates. So I do very much think CSS use and observance of W3C is helpful - but it is not actually essential in SEO terms.