A SEO compliant website is a website which has been Search Engine optimized following the guidelines for best practices that characterize White Hat or Ethical SEO. There's many benefits to having a SEO compliant website, and even better, no disadvantages. The most obvious benefit of having a SEO compliant website is that, since the optimization has been done following the rules of play set by the Search Engines themselves, the risk of being penalysed or removed from the search engine results listings due to cheating is zero. However, there are many other benefits from having a SEO compliant website.
First of all, Search Engines will not only not penalyze you, but if your website is SEO compliant, it is almost sure that the search engine spiders are processing your content as effectively as possible. This will make it considerably easier to rank for the right keywords. Search Engines want to be able to crawl your content as quick as possible, and by making things easier for them you’re encouraging them to visit your page more often.
Another benefit of having a website that follows the Search Engines optimization guidelines is that your visitors will also benefit from reduced load times, standards compliant HTML markup that browsers render properly and organized content that makes a breeze finding information. There’s nothing so annoying as a user than landing on a page following a search engine result link and finding out it has nothing to do with your query. By following the SEO guidelines, you are making sure that your content is indeed relevant to the searches it is listed as a result for.
Having a SEO compliant website also means that more people can access your website. For example, visitors who user screen readers due to visual deficiencies. Since a search engine spider actually fetchs the page much the same way as a screen reader would, their guidelines are oriented towards making a website as accessible as possible. Accessibility is a hot topic, and with more and more legislation being passed towards making the Internet accessible for everybody it’s really worth investing time on it.
Search Engines interests lay on the side of the web visitors, and for that reason the guidelines to become SEO compliant are clearly designed to provide visitors with a better user experience, more relevant content and websites that are accessible for everybody. By following them, you are making your website better in the eyes of both search engines and your audience, and that directly reflects on its popularity. Of course, you will also need keyword rich good quality content and a good linking strategy, but by having a SEO compliant website you are making sure your SEO strategy gets off on the right foot.