How important is W3C Validation

[ck8795]

@livecasino, I admire your willingness to learn.

Just one more tip, that page you linked to in your last post is extremely long, not only does it take forever to load but I got bored just spinning my mouse wheel to get to the bottom of the page. You should divide that page up into sub-pages, that will make it easier for visitors to view content they would find interesting.

Totally disagree - long pages are great if you know how to break it up. livecasino you need to toss all those images or find a way to reduce the size of them. Learn how to host your own banners and get rid of 90% of those images. You have a ton of information on that page - yet we're lost on the images (many which really aren't helping you). The page is poorly optimized for visitors. Where are your CTA's? I would break it up a bit and create a sub menu specifically for that page using named anchors

[kara cruise]

The importance of W3C Validation is if that HTML or CSS code can work properly to different browsers such as Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari, Netscape Navigator and Opera.

[livecasino]

Totally disagree - long pages are great........

Thanks for the opinion Kaus... Love these opposite opinions... because it really defines the deeper mechanics behind the subject being discussed.

.....break it up a bit and create a sub menu specifically for that page using named anchors

I could break the pages up (opinion from Ixian) or keep it long but trim down the images and anchor some menus (opinion from Kaus) They both sound logical, do-able and I will try both for the sake of experience. This site is my first and the poor thing is being used to learn from.

Kaus... by "breaking her up" You are referring to leaving it whole but dividing it up into logical sections and using "name anchors" with a "sub menu" at the top of the page?

I have two groups of casino reviews (USA and non-USA) totaling 15 casinos to reorganize on the site Mac-online. Perhaps I will practice both methods and see which perform better. That would be very interesting indeed.

I have banners with call to actions Kaus. The missing call to actions you are referring to are missing in the script????

Cathy
Online Casino Reviews at Mac Online Slots
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[ck8795]

Break it up something like this

http://www.gamesblackjack.org/strategy/card-counting/
http://www.gamesblackjack.org/rules/terms/

(shameful plugin I know but it gives a good example)

I would do your intro, followed by a sub menu with the most important parts showing first. Your sections should follow by importance so review summary, security, software review, bonus review, how to contact customer support and payment methods available.

In those sections you can break it down again based on specifics. Things like the homepage design for blackjack vs games isn't as important as the bonuses or security. They should come last and only be touch on briefly. (just my opinion)

From there I would take each section and make sure I had bullet points in there so that the people who don't want to read a big long page/section can also skim it and get the gist of it.

As for your CTA's. I know you have banners - IMHO banners suck and are a distraction. Under each main paragraph you should have something that says Join Betsafe now and claim your xxxx bonus! Thats a CTA - banners IMO aren't and what would be interesting for you to try is split test. Place a banner in a visible spot (does not need to be a big one) and also add a hyperlink to say the casino name in the first sentence...see which one gets you more clicks, downloads etc.

I think you could have a really kick ass awesome page but right now you have so much information on it (and images) that nobody can find the information they are looking for.


and toss all of these images like the one below. I know you probably spent time working on them but really it's clutter on the page

http://www.mac-online-slots.com/wp-c...ews-630x50.jpg

I dont want to keep derailing OP's thread so maybe we could continue in private or a mod can move your threads into a new one.

[Former Member 14]

W3C validation is NOT important at all financially or with the major search engines. Personally I would not spend much time at all worrying about it.

You need to work out whether you want to spend your time working out how to code to pass an esoteric test - or spend your time making money.

I prefer to focus on the folding stuff ...

Some wise words for ppl to think about IMHO.

I used to be totally pedantic about WC3 validation. But seriously it's BS. Take a cruise through the SE's and run some test on the top sites ranking for some serious keywords. Not too many would pass but they sure rank well and I'm sure are making some nice dollars.

I personally think my time can be spent doing far more productive things than being obsessed with WC3 protocols.
WC3 is just like PR a waste of time chasing.


Cheers



Dave

[DaftDog]

Totally disagree - long pages are great if you know how to break it up. livecasino you need to toss all those images or find a way to reduce the size of them. Learn how to host your own banners and get rid of 90% of those images. You have a ton of information on that page - yet we're lost on the images (many which really aren't helping you). The page is poorly optimized for visitors. Where are your CTA's? I would break it up a bit and create a sub menu specifically for that page using named anchors

Or you can do what kaus suggests. My point was to make the page more user friendly by improving the load time of the page and categorising your content. As a visitor to your site I wouldn't like to stand around and watch paint dry and would move on to something more interesting in a flash.

[livecasino]

Kaus, Aussie and Ixian.... you guys are really impressing me with the time and concern you are showing. I cant thank you enough. It is like I was too long here alone... punching out pages without experience and/or help. I hear what you all are saying. Listening to you guys and reading up on SEO has brought in some light. I am slashing chopping re-categorizing and generally slimming this poor dog of a web site into something that will work. I really like this stuff... boy is it hard work for me. I have my nose to the grind stone and will look up in a day or so to get a breath of air. WOW what a brain trip trying to wrap what needs to be done in my head before I start off. But I have started with the deposit methods... almost done but the casinos and slots will take me forever, chopping, slimming h1 and h2 ing with metas galore all in bold. Yippes!!!

Have a great week end musketeers.

Cathy
Online Casino Reviews at Mac Online Slots
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[DaftDog]

I agree that W3C is not compulsory to rank well in the search engines. But is it not advisable to start getting your site little bit more W3C compatable each year. The internet is evolving and if you don't keep up to date with the latest requirements your site may appear a bit broken and pre-historic in browsers in five or ten years time.

[jctroy440]

I am not as much concerned with W3C as I am with load time. It seems when I run flash banners, Google sends me love letters telling me my site is slow. I go back to gif banners and everybody seems happy.

I don't use a lot of flash banners although I think they do look better

I have my banners and links tagged with different code so I'll see which brings the most traffic.

[livecasino]

I agree that W3C is not compulsory to rank well in the search engines. But is it not advisable to start getting your site little bit more W3C compatable each year. The internet is evolving and if you don't keep up to date with the latest requirements your site may appear a bit broken and pre-historic in browsers in five or ten years time.

Hit The nail right on the head.

[TheGooner]

Maybe - we will see what the web looks like in 5-10 years - although I suspect that it will not be too far away from today.

Personally, I do NOT see ANY serious browser deciding to depreciate ANY of the current HTML statements or commands that are in operation today.

There is no upside for the browser producing company to do so - as implementation of a reduced instruction set tightly complying with W3C will make their browser incompatiable with many existing webpages.

There is a great mass of website content out there today that is capable of being correctly rendered that is not W3C compliant. W3C is an academic standard that bears no relevance to the the real commerical world.

The inevitable conclusion is that browsers will continue to remain backward compatiable with ALL of the HTML commands available today - and W3C will continue to be irrelevant.

[DaftDog]

I found this article on W3C compliancy rather interesting. You can read more here.

In an interview with Frederick Townes of W3 EDGE Web Design he mentioned a number of less SEO-related though very compelling arguments for W3C-complaince. Some non-SEO reasons to take on this important step in the lifecycle of your site are:

• Compliance help ensure accessibility for the disabled.
• Compliance helps ensure that your website is accessible from a number of devices; from different browsers to the growing number of surfers using PDAs and cellular phones.
• Compliance will also help ensure that regardless of the browser, resolution, device, etc. that your website will look and function in the same or at least a very similar fashion.

[livecasino]

Hey Kaus, Aussie and Ixian,

I have been reorganizing my site. Could you guys bounce in and give me a few comments. The page I reorganized is
http://www.mac-online-slots.com/bets...no-review.html

The reason I am so down in SERPs (besides the pages being too slow)is because I tried something new... and it fell on its face (I should be shot) For example this page
http://www.mac-online-slots.com/cate...ws/comparisons
is a review (too slow loading but that is not the point) page with about 70 single pages. Every line in the charts is a page. For example here is one page
http://www.mac-online-slots.com/nord...re-review.html
I really had a lot of fun putting it together. All the other casino review pages on my site are actually categories as well. I was interested in doing this because I am really into the comparison charts. I felt it was a good product.The chart lines go EVERY WHERE so it is easy to keep them in one place and not reposted on 6 different pages. Sort of like a data base...sort of.

But the problem is (besides being too slow in loading and too long to read) that the pages that make them up are so small they get no attention from Google. The categories don't rate with Google either... Google supplemental indexes category pages. So my whole site is dumped by Google. But it was a lot of fun. (But I should be shot) So Now I am starting over. The Betsafe casino review is my 1st that I did over. And thanks for the help.

I should be shot. I need to get Google back on track. It is going to take me 2 months to dump the category idea and get good solid, readable, seo friendly pages back on the net.

I have no idea why I did that... yes I do.. it was something different and I liked the accessible chart line in one place to make changes if nec. Also i could just send the chart line to any (category) page I wanted to. For example a deposit method. A casino would have 10 deposit methods. So I would send the casinos Chart line to every deposit method it offered. It would show up there when a visitor was reviewing the particular method. But I should be shot.

Cathy
Online Casino Reviews at Mac Online Slots
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[Nandakishore]

I made the following observations:

1. The initial uploading time is not acceptable. However, once the site is up, I think it can keep visitors there because there are many things to browse through.
2. You provide huge amount of information in different categories, very interesting, but I think it is a bit of overkill.
3. I am sure you will have problem in updating all information you provide.
4. I think you should reduce the number of images on the site.
5. If you are having SERP problem, I would recommend that you first focus on one or two sections of the site and don't get overrun by your own huge offer.
6. I checked with site:.. and found google has more than 2000 entries. I found there quite a few of your urls about 'deposit methods'. If I were you I would try for top Serps for keywords around deposit methods because they are frequently used as search arguments.

[ck8795]

Before I post - cause its gonna be a long one - can I request with livecasino's permission that the posts for site review and help on her/his site be moved to it's own thread. I think this thread is getting quite congested and might be hard to follow for someone who is looking for the W3C stuff.

Just my opnion

[GaryTheScubaGuy]

W3C compliance has very little to do with rankings and SEO unless you have very serious problems.

Google itself has 3 dozen W3C errors.

This isn't saying that its nothing to be concerned with as some of the errors it identifies are important, especially in mobile platforms and any html 5 applications you may be involved with. (...and not that it really applies in this arena but voice/speech web-based programs will also find it important).

Overall though I would say to check it to see if anything major stands out, but Google WMC and many other tools are much better at identifying more serious issues and giving recommendations on how to fix problems as well as identify them.

[LiveCasinoPartners]

Between GarytheScubaGuy and the Gooner this question is resolved. I suspected as much. I know html and found that many of the W3C compliant issues I had were insignificant syntax on image tags like <image src="" /> that were generated by dreamweaver. I look for the major errors and then go from there. Google and other search engines are looking for relevant content. They care about end user search satisfaction.

[livecasino]

Before I post - cause its gonna be a long one - can I request with livecasino's permission that the posts for site review and help on her/his site be moved to it's own thread. I think this thread is getting quite congested and might be hard to follow for someone who is looking for the W3C stuff.

Klaus,
Thanks for the offer. I could really use the recomendations...big time!
That would be a good idea... how is that done... moving the thread I mean?

Cathy
<a href="http://www.mac-online-slots.com/"> Online Casino Reviews </a> at Mac Online Slots
<a href="http://www.livecasinodirectory.co.uk/">Live Casino List</a>

[livecasino]

1. The initial uploading time is not acceptable. However, once the site is up, I think it can keep visitors there because there are many things to browse through.
.................
6. I checked with site:.. and found google has more than 2000 entries. I found there quite a few of your urls about 'deposit methods'. If I were you I would try for top Serps for keywords around deposit methods because they are frequently used as search arguments.

I will try and focus on why it is not loading fast enough

I am working on Deposit methods first. It will take me a few days.
All observations I will not repeat the same mistake. Overkill for example and too many images. I Understand. Very good. Thanks

Cathy
<a href="http://www.mac-online-slots.com/"> Online Casino Reviews </a> at Mac Online Slots
<a href="http://www.livecasinodirectory.co.uk/">Live Casino List</a>

[DaftDog]

I will try and focus on why it is not loading fast enough

I am working on Deposit methods first. It will take me a few days.
All observations I will not repeat the same mistake. Overkill for example and too many images. I Understand. Very good. Thanks

Cathy
Online Casino Reviews at Mac Online Slots
Live Casino List

You need to start a new thread so that you don't hijack (to late) this thread about W3C.