In the past, we've said that your website doesn't need to meet the standards for web programming set forth by the W3C organization. W3C creates the guidelines for the perfect world of the web, and they are pretty tough to meet.
In general, you should try your best to follow their guidelines because they result in cleanly programmed websites that work well with web browsers and search engines. The W3C guidelines also help us all to achieve faster websites, mobile websites, and an overall faster internet.
If ever a website were to "go green" by today's standards, it would be to follow the W3C standards.
However, it's easy to lose sight of those guidelines if you are programming your own website, using a content management system or even a program like Dreamweaver. You might even want to throw those guidelines out the window, but how does that affect your SEO?
This answer is that it doesn't. You DO NOT have to be W3C compliant in order to rank well in the search engines. You simply need to have easy-to-read code.
Let's run a little test to find out if you have easy to read code.
Go to any page on your website and view the source.
Firefox:
Right click anywhere on the web page and select "View Page Source."
Chrome:
Right click anywhere on the web page and select "View page source."
Internet Explorer:
Right click anywhere on the web page and select "View Source."
Opera:
Right click anywhere on the web page and select "Source."
Safari:
Right click anywhere on the web page and select "View Source."
With the source code visible you simply need to try and read it. Look for the real words that you normally see on the web page. It might be difficult to read, but look carefully between all the junk code.
The goal is to find your text easily. If you have a hard time finding your text, or if you find the text but it's broken up between programming code, then your website building process is hurting you.
Even though the search engines will find what you have on the web page, Google also says they don't guarantee that they will process all the code on a page if there is too much of it, and that's the bottom line today.
The programming on your website does not have to be perfect, but it needs to be clean enough to read without a web browser and not require Google to work too hard. The less time it works on 1 page, the more time Google has to download and read another page from your site.
