SEO Expert Blog

Firefox is a great Web browser. It offers good Web standards support and is open source. As a Web developer who regularly creates templates/themes based on Photoshop designs, Web standards compliance is a very important aspect and one of the reasons I hate Internet Explorer. As a person who believes in the spirit of open source, it is also important that Firefox is open source software.

The speed of Web page rendering is not the biggest strength of Firefox, there are other browsers that render pages more quickly, but the most important aspect, that makes Firefox incomparably useful are the free extensions available.

Good news for Webmasters and SEOs. The big three in the search engine market Google, Microsoft and Yahoo agreed to support Google's Sitemaps protocol.

Thus the Google sitemaps protocol has become a de-facto Web standard. Congrats to Google for one further step towards world domination.

You can find more information on the new web site: www.sitemaps.org.

References

GrayBit offers a tool for converting the colors of your website to their grayscale equivalents, so you can test the visual contrast of your website. Like most other Web 2.0 application GrayBit has it's limitations and works best on websites that make use of cascading style sheets and a standardized markup. Nonetheless it's well worth trying this on your website as an additional tool to test this aspect of accessibility.

Websites that comply with Web standards rank better in search engines. Is this true? Well, you will find examples of sites that rank very high that do not comply with standards, because there are a range of factors the determine your site's rank. More important is the number of quality sites, i. e. sites that are ranking well, that link back to your site.