Many newcomers think that, why their website is not getting indexed by the search engines? But they don’t realize the mistakes they do while building the website. One of the major mistake the newbie’s overlook is the Validation of HTML Code.
Let’s talk about, how important is the valid HTML code in SEO to ensure that your website is properly indexed by the search engines.
Valid HTML code has an extreme importance to search engine optimization.
Why valid HTML code is so important to your web site’s search engine optimization efforts and succeeding high rankings:
Many webmasters and newcomers to web page design overlook a crucial aspect of website promotion – the validity of the HTML code.
What is valid HTML code?
Most web pages are written in HTML.
As for every language, HTML has its own grammar, vocabulary and syntax, and each document written in HTML is supposed to follow these rules.
Like any language, HTML constantly changes. As HTML has become a relative complex language, it’s very easy to make mistakes … and we do know by now the favorable weight the new msn.com beta search engine places on proper coding practice.
HTML code that is not following the official rules is called invalid HTML code. Why is valid HTML code important to search engine optimization and your whole marketing effort?
Search engines have to parse the HTML code of your web site to find the relevant content. If your HTML code contains errors, search engines might not be able to find the content on the page, and there ends your SEO efforts and quest for high rankings of that page.
Search engine crawler programs obey HTML standards. They only can index your web site if it is compliant to the HTML standard. If there’s a mistake in your web page code, they might stop crawling your web site and they might lose what they’ve collected so far because of the error.
Although most major search engines can deal with minor errors in HTML code, a single missing bracket in your HTML code can be the reason your web page cannot be found in search engines.
If you don’t close some tags properly, or if some important tags are missing, search engines might ignore the complete content of that page.
How can you check the validity of your HTML code? Fortunately, there are free services that allow you to check the validity of your HTML code.
The search engine optimization community’s HTML Validator is the W3C HTML Validator.
It is the service that all webmasters use to checks HTML documents for conformance to W3C HTML and XHTML recommendations and other HTML standards.
Just enter the address of a web page at the free W3C HTML Validator and the Validator will tell you what errors are on that page.
Although not all HTML errors will cause problems for your search engine rankings, some of them can keep web spiders from indexing your web pages and spoil your search engine optimization efforts.
Valid HTML code makes it easier for search engine spiders to index your site so you should make sure that at least the biggest mistakes in your HTML code are corrected.
Make sure you run your web pages through the W3C Validator, make the recommended alterations and the new MSN.com beta search will love you… The MSN search engine places a high value on proper coding practice.
Posted under SEO Tips, Search Engine Optimization
This post was written by teeky on March 31, 2009
Tags: free W3C HTML Validator, high rankings, HTML, HTML Code, HTML Validator, invalid HTML code, marketing, msn, parse, Search engine crawler, Search Engine Optimization, search engine spiders, Search Engines, SEO, spiders, syntax, Valid HTML Code, validation, W3C HTML, W3C HTML Validator, W3C Validator, web pages, Webmasters, website promotion, XHTML
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of learning and understanding the search engines and their indexing algorithm in and changing or designing a web site to rank high on user searches. Rank is the relative position in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) for a keyword or key phrase search.
