Valid HTML Code crucial to SEO
Newcomers to web page design often overlook a crucial aspect of SEO and web site promotion: the validity of the HTML code.
What is Valid HTML code?
Well for starters, most web pages are written in HTML.
As for every language, HTML has its own grammar and syntax, and each document written in HTML is supposed to follow these rules.
HTML constantly changes and as it now has become a relatively complex issue, it is very easy to make mistakes … and we do know by now the favorable weight the new MSN search engine places on proper coding practise … Refer proper coding practice required to rank highly at MSN SEO for MSN.com
If your HTML code is not following the official rules it is called invalid HTML code.
Why Valid HTML code is crucial to SEO and good SE rankings
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 .. thereby short circuiting your optimization efforts.
Dynamically generated Links, or those URL’s for example that end in a question mark and numbers, are often overlooked by the search engine robots. This necessitates the application of “re-write” rules on the applicable .htaccess file to convert such links to appear as Static HTML links so they qualify for listing in the SERPs.
Search engine crawler programs obey HTML standards. They only can index your web site if it is compliant to the official HTML standard. If there’s a mistake in your web page code, the SE spider might stop crawling your web site and lose what they’ve collected so far because of the error.
Most major search engines can deal with minor errors in HTML code, however, a single missing bracket or ‘tick’ in your HTML code can be the reason your web page cannot be found in search engines.
Why?
Having valid markup ensures spiders see the web page as you intended. Open or missing tags and broken markup can lead to ambiguous intentions being sent to the spiders. If your page is valid, you can be sure that any decent spider will be able to identify precisely what you want and interpret the page correctly.
Browser display problems: Even the simplest display errors can cause big problems - particularly in browsers like Netscape and Opera .. as these two browsers adhere more stringently to W3C standards. It is best to test browser compatibility for each web site you design to ensure it displays correctly in the major browsers — Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape and Opera.
EXAMPLE: Although Internet Explorer may ignore a problem like a missing closing TABLE tag, at the date of writing… such an exclusion will cause Netscape to ignore the entire table and all its contents.
How to 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 W3 HTML Validator .
It is the service that all professionals use to check HTML documents for conformance to W3C HTML and XHTML recommendations and other HTML standards.
Just enter the address of a web page at either the W3C HTML validator or the Web Design Group HTML Validator and you will discover what errors are on that page.
The Web Design Group validator above is the recommended option if you are not completely comfortable with HTML and the required standards .. the recommended corrections are far easier to decipher and implement.
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 markup and 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.
Refer recent search engine marketing posts: search engine optimization for the MSN beta search and simple search engine optimization tips for online blogs to assist in accurate optimizing of your blog Posts. You will be pleased with the results.
Please leave comments about your experiences with valid markup and html code and how your SE rankings were affected.
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[...] .. the MSN search engine places a high value on proper coding practise.Entire article available at: Valid HTML code crucial to SEOCopyright 2005 Marketing Defined. All Rights Reserved. This article may be reproduced in its [...]
Very well written article. What would you say what is the correct keyword density for SEO?
@Mediatoimisto
Keyword density no longer bears the weight it used to. Still attempt to place your main keyword early in the first paragraph and repeat in the last.
Theme density is far more important in line with Google’s recent LSI patent. In short if you have an article on Golf, you should make sure to include theme related keyphrases in all articles.
For example: Tiger Woods, Greg Norman, Golf Clubs, Golf Course etc.
This post on theme density vs keyword density should help.
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