Silver Award Guidelines

W3C Validation (Silver Award)

This element provides the criteria for your Silver Award under the WelcomeWeb Awards Scheme. It covers coding errors and warnings described below.

Coding Errors and Warnings

These are errors in code detected by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) validation service, which could result in warnings. Code validation and how a website is pieced together can be a key factor in achieving higher positions within the search engines. Having validated code enables search engines to crawl sites more easily, reducing the risk of errors, making sites more accessible to search engines and users alike.

W3C Validation Errors
Levels Award
51+ errors  
26-50 errors  
0-25 errors Silver Award
W3C Validation Warnings
Levels Award
21+ warnings  
11-20 warnings  
0-10 warnings Silver Award

Backlinks / Inbound Links

Backlinks (inbound links from other websites), are one of the most important aspects of online marketing. They give an indication of how popular your site is within the internet community and your site's prospects for gaining business through means other than search engines. When ranking your site, Google will look on it more more favourably if it has many backlinks providing they are relevent to the content of your site.

Backlinks
Levels Your Score
0-5 backlinks ?
6-10 backlinks ?
>10 backlinks ?

Page Title and Meta Description

These are highly important and are the first things that search engines reads when they spider your website. They are also the first things a user sees when they are viewing search results and deciding which site to click on. If these elements do not have a main keyphrase within them, or describe in the best possible way what you're offering visitors, then your site could be losing valuable visitors.

Title & Meta Description
Levels Your Score
No Title / Meta Description?
Title Only?
Title and Meta Description?

Google Page Rank

This is Google's way of assessing the overall authority of a website by taking many different factors into account including backlinks, keyword density, code validation, age of site etc, and giving a page rank based on that information. There is much more to it than can be described here but page rank is a good indication of how well a site is regarded by Google. A page rank of 0 is bad and 7-10 very good.

Google Page Rank
Levels Your Score
0-2 ?
3-4 ?
5+ ?