Today I am going to share some html css and wcag v2 aaa validation tools with you. these things will help to make sure your site performs as well as it can, and as fast as it can.
google have announced that they are now counting the loading time of your site in their search results. this is good. it means that the sites at the top of the results wont be slow.
there are a few things you can do to make your sites better all round:
make sure your code is valid.
- you can validate your html code at http://validator.w3.org
- you can validate your css at http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
- you can validate your rss feed at http://validator.w3.org/feed/
- you can validate your site for accessibility (wcag v2 aaa) at http://www.totalvalidator.com/validator/ValidatorForm
- http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/ is another that has an excelent feature that will spider your site (doesnt work for html5 though)
once your code is valid it will load faster in browsers as they dont have to try to guess what you mean. I try to get my code valid in all of them
there are also other tools that can help you improve the speed of your site
- http://nibbler.silktide.com/ is a good free tool to test a lot of different factors, including speed
- yahoo Yslow addon for firefox will test a multitude of things
- google pageSpeed will test the speed of your page too
once you have a good ballance of all these things then if you are still having problems ranking well you can at least rule out invalid code and speed of your site as factors and you can start looking elsewhere.
- seomoz has a stack of free tools that can help you in this regard http://www.seomoz.org/tools
oh, just to let you know that as im writing this my site has w3c valid html5, w3c valid css 3, wcag v2 aaa and scored 8.1 on the nibbler test (well, it just dropped from 8.1 to 7.7 when I changed some code so I changed it back – but I cant re-test it till tomorrow =| ) it also gets a grade B on the yslow v2 test (cos I cant afford a content delivery network =)