Web standards and search engine optimisation.

I recently revamped BifSniff Cartoons. In doing do I made every effort to have the site validate to XHTML 1.0 strict using the W3C validator and I also made sure my CSS validated using their CSS validator.

Then I did some more, very basic, search engine optimisation stuff. Most of which is just part of building a valid site anyway, like adding meta tags. I used a handy tool courtesy of Michele Neylon, which I updated to include closing tags so that the code (as you can see here).

When I was finished I said to Bif that it should increase our visibility in search engines, but that due to the amount of cartoons out there it would be a struggle to get real results. Now, we probably need to think about our strategy a bit because for example we are billing ourselves as "irreverent single panel cartoons" and since the revamp we usually get in the top 5 Google results for that term. But as I said to Bif, how many people will search for that!

I had said to Bif that while I would love to get ranked for "single panel cartoons" it was highly unlikely due to the sheer volume of sites that would be vying for ranking on that term.

But then today on a random search I noticed we are in the top 100 Google rankings for "single panel cartoons". Now, we are at somewhere between 85 and 99 but even so, I think it's an achievement, considering.

By simply building a standards compliant site and trying to use best practices where-ever possible we have indeed made ourselves more visible on search engines. Not to mention all the other benefits to standard compliant sites.