How important is having validated HTML?

JaneCompersNews · 02-12-2004, 04:42 PM

Like many others here I have a new site (in it's fourth month) and I managed to get it to rank really well on my chosen keywords pre Austin. I lost my main keyword and a few others in Austin, totally gone, nowhere to be seen and I still have some two word key phrases not affected.

I have been reading the forums here and following all of the advice, lots of links, keywords in anchor text etc. Just quietly plodding my way through emailing lots of webmasters

I've made a few minor changes to the site too to see if it would make any difference (basically a bit of keyword stuffing) but it hasn't so I will go back and unstuff the site.

I read here too about another member having had so many errors in their HTML that this could affect their rankings so I went and found an online HTML validator and checked my site (smiley for a major heart attack goes here!). It was bad! I'm no website builder but I've done my best and managed to get the errors down to only 4 (my page looks a bit funny now but hey ho

).

Anyway, my point.... (finally! - it's because I'm a girl you now, can't help but babbly on

) I used the HTML validator to check the top ranking sites for my keywords and all of their HTML is in a right state (not like mine now she says smugly

)

So. Does is affect rankings? Messy HTML hasn't seemed to have any negative affect on the top ranking sites in my industry.

Thanks too for everyone's input here, it's very helpful to newbies like me

Jane

GoldDust · 02-12-2004, 05:27 PM

Hi JaneCompersNews, welcome to IMR forums,

One of the main reasons for the W3C validation is to help with your visitors browser compatabilty, allowing cross browser viewing for your web site -
there are other obvious benifits to validating your html, CSS, XHTML etc.. as a search engine spider will not effectivly read html or other code that has missing tags or messed up tags etc, etc...so validation can be helpful in locating those little probs in your code.

In the past I must have invested days on cleaning and validating my code - the only obvious changes was "page size reduction" due to cleaning my html & keeping tight coding standards, and vistors to my site can view my web site on most browsers....

also it feels good to know that your code is in top condition..

niceguyeddie · 02-12-2004, 05:41 PM

For a web designer, it is a reflection of your attention to detail and thus your work in general. Likewise, it can help with the search engines when wacky html distorts the view. Finally, as mentioned above, it is the easiest way to fix cross browser problems (though a validated site doesn't guarrentee no problems). Strive for valid and strict XHTML as it will make your mark-up cleaner

I, Brian · 02-13-2004, 12:49 AM

Hi JaneCompersNews and welcome to the forums.

I wouldn't worry too much about W3 validation - I find some of it so completely an*l. I construct webpages for browsers, fin. That's all that matters. Heck, if even Mozilla will display it correctly then the code is fine, IMO.

However, having functional HTML should be a real concern. I use Doctor HTML for checking that:
http://www.doctor-html.com/RxHTML/cgi-bin/single.cgi

and it's great for indicating serious functional errors.

W3 validation isn't necessary for SEO purposes, but something like Doctor HTML is good at picking up basic mistakes that can impact your pages and your rankings - such as broken links and missing alt tags for starters.

JaneCompersNews · 02-13-2004, 04:44 AM

Hi to everyone that replied, thanks for your help

Brian, that's a really useful link, thanks!

Jane

Johan007 · 02-13-2004, 09:24 AM

Bottom line... its not a SEO issue!... its far too slow to process by SE!

However you may want to include these lines cos I had a positive rank change after I added this thou it MAY NOT BE THE REASON!:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html><head><title>your title<title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<meta name="Content-Language" content="en-GB">

Note: make sure you use whats relevent to YOUR site and not just copy the above eg: en-GB is for british sites and if are USA you should use another tag.

HTML tag maybe <HTML XMLNS:IE> depending on how comlex the site is.

All sorts of DOCTYPE.... do a search on Google to find out more.

Use charset use iso-8859-1 or UTF-8 if you write in English.