“Double U what?” was the most common answer I got when I posed this question to some friends who are also casual bloggers. I then realized that not everyone pays attention to W3C anymore – especially those who are relatively new to the Internet game. I was once again reminded of W3C when I read Ann Smarty’s post on the topic.

So what is W3C exactly? She explains it as:

The World Wide Web Consortium working to develop open standards for the World Wide Web (abbreviated WWW or W3) so that Web documents can be consistently displayed across all platforms.

Founded in 1994 the consortium is still the main web standard against which all websites are evaluated. The most well known W3C tool is Markup Validation Service that checks the markup validity of Web documents in HTML, XHTML, SMIL, MathML, etc. Other valuable tools include RSS/Atom feed validator or CSS validator, Mobile content checker, and broken link checker.

So if it is a standard, does it mean that it is most updated? Unfortunately, technology seems to be developing too fast for W3C and this may not be the case. Ann Smarty further writes:

• many of the standards are too old and are based on the last century realia (e.g. according to W3C any page limit is twenty kilobytes which is not necessary to conform to with today’s high-speed Internet connections);
• the market is moving many times faster than the W3C committee (e.g. mobile Internet which evolves too fast for both W3C and Google to compile).

So should you check your web site if it is W3C compliant? I suggest that since it is still considered the main standard, you might as well. However, do not be content with merely being W3C compliant. Do take a look at other trends and see how your web site can be improved.

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I have not used Internet Explorer for quite a while now. Ever since I tried Mozilla Firefox, I was hooked. I did try out Safari and Google Chrome – and still use them sometimes – but never IE. I can’t overlook the fact that there are still countless people out there who use IE, though, and when working on web sites or blogs, those users cannot be discounted.

There is some news with regard to SEO and the new version of the Internet Explorer, IE8. Andrew Girdwood has this to say about the matter:

Popular search engine optimisation and internet marketing blogs look set to prove that they practise what they preach by boasting designs that hold up well in the forthcoming Internet Explorer 8.

It is the new ‘Suggested Sites’ feature that is most likely to upset these stalwart bloggers as Microsoft’s technology offers to take readers straight to competing blogs or, in some cases, unfamiliar download sites.

In his article, he highlights some of the most prolific blogs on SEO and search and points out things about their design that may be affected by IE8. You might want to take a closer look at those points in his article, especially if you have picked up a design idea or two from any of those blogs he talks about.

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Just recently, one of my blogger friends asked me again about how to remove the no-follow attribute in her blog comments. She read about the “do follow” movement and wanted to be part of that. That got me to reading up on new developments with regard to no follow and do follow…

I found an interesting article at Econsultancy, which promotes the use of the no follow attribute as part of your SEO best practices. Naturally, being a do follow enthusiast, I had to read the whole article in an effort to understand the rationale behind the statement. This is what I found out:

While the concept of ‘PageRank leak’ – the idea that you can potentially ‘dilute’ your PageRank by linking out too much – has been widely debated for years, there’s no doubt that good linking practices are important to maintaining PageRank.

Linking to third party websites that Google thinks are ’spammy’ can harm you. As Google itself advises, “avoid links to web spammers or ‘bad neighborhoods’ on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.”

This is where using the ‘nofollow’ attribute on outbound links can be a valuable SEO tool.

One of my personal blogs has had no PR for months now – after having a halfway decent PR of 3. Perhaps I am leaking out PageRank because of not using the no follow attribute. I should take a look into this. Maybe you should, too.

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Admit it or not, there are some aspects in SEO that can be classified as traditional.  These are the practices that have been established from the beginning and are considered to be the building blocks of all SEO activities. These are ideas which have withstood the test of time and that everyone takes for granted to be the “ultimate truth.”

Take the use of keywords for one.  We all know that in order to optimize our web sites, we need to choose those keywords which most people are using when they search for information.  For a certain niche, there is a group of words or phrases that are most commonly employed by people who want to find out more about that niche.  And these are the words that we want to use most in our web sites in order to rank well in the search engine results.

Now how about if we diverge a bit from that traditional way of thinking?  Let us say that we try to use other keywords which may not be as popular?  Non-traditional indeed but it just might give good results in the long run.  Come to think of it, this concept is not that new.  We have heard of the argument which pits short-tail keywords and long-tail keywords against each other so many times.  In essence, using the not so popular keywords mean using long-tail keywords, right?

Experts say that SEO is going to enjoy a modest boost in 2009.  Perhaps it is time to be part of that success and try other less common methods – such as using less popular keywords.  What do you think?

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