Greetings friends, It seems to me that these days, with lots of WYSIWYG tools out there that allow rookies to build websites without a single bit of knowledge of HTML or other languages; that the quality of the internet's HTML has decreased dramatically. While I think that it's great that anyone can now create a website, purely for fun, or for their business; as it has allowed the internet to expand substancially and allow information to be shared more effectively and quickly. It had also allowed a spammer culture to form which has also tainted the once utopian form of the internet. Anyway, I am not here to talk about WYSIWIG tools. Several months ago, I cam accross a thread here on DP which was a list of useful firefox addons for webmasters. One of these was called HTMLValidator (it's badically the w3c validator but it valudates every site you visit and shows either a tick or a cross in the bottom right of the browser depending on if the html is valid or not. Since then, I have been subconsiously monitoring each website I visit. It has now struck me that there are extremely few sites that I have visited which actually have valid HTML. The only one that comes to mind is the BBC.co.uk site. Upon this realisation, I thought to myself how surprising it was that almost all of the websites I had encountered over the last few months were built with shoddy coding. Including websites like google and youtube. A scary point is that google gives more weight to off-page SEO than onpage SEO - surely most of SEO should be on site as it is the site you are trying to get high rankings for. As I thought about it more and more it actually became less unbelieveable. The feeling in the internet at large, is that it's is what the site looks like on the surface that matters, it's what attracts visitors and sales. What most rookies seem not to know is that the search engines see sites differently to people. Also most webmasters don't even know if they have invalid HTML. I admit, I too have sites with some minor invaldiations in the code. But it is the fault of large site e.g google showing a bad example to other webmasters that makes people think that the validation of HTML is not important. Another thing I should mention, is that when you're code is valid, your site tends to run faster - and as the google ranking algorithm takes speed into account you can see helpful increases in your search rankings by validating your code. So many so called 'gurus' in SEO tell you that link building and other off-page SEO is all-important. These are the same people that tell you to get a web 2.0 design which is invalid and slow to load! The final, and most worrying point I have to make, is that I have seen countless sites with "this site was designed and built by 'such and such webdesign LTD'" in the footers. The sites themselves may look nice but aren't up to much cop in terms of on-page SEO; and then when I follow the link in the footer to the site of the webdesign company - their HTML is invalid as well. This is basically stealing - they take your money for something that looks nice but is riddled with disease on the inside. I hope this post has given people an insight into the issue of valid/invalid HTML. Just to sum up the problem - you wouldn't purposfully use incorrect spelling or grammar in the visible section of your site, so why disregard the errors in your code?
You said it yourself, people actually don't care about valid presentation, and are more concerned with finding their content. Big companies like Google and Microsoft, after reaching a substantial market share, try to push standards their way, in order to increase their profits. This could sound like a conspiracy theory, but is actually true. Think about it for a second. It is a well known fact that MIcrosoft advertises some HTML incompatibilities only usable in IE. However, they are not an isolated case. Netscape company did it before them, and now Google does it nowdays (nofollow tag was their suggestion). Ordinary people got used to getting content the slow and wrong way, so they don't care about it. Today it is more important to just push the content, than to push it the right way. I completly agree with you, but this topic becomes more and more irrelevant.
there are thousands of site made in one hour... but still nobody can make website popular within 1 day! so dont worry about on-page just leave it to search engine algo
No one can clap with a single palm! you will have to focus on all aspects of SEO, and it is also true that noone can give you guarantee of top ranking.
I do not believe that good SEO specialists only think about off page SEO. On-page SEO is still very important, although the relevance of inbound links is really high these days. From my point of view, it is just as Imtiger said, you can create thousands of sites but that does not mean that they will become popular. I will tell you, as a visitor, that I do not really care about the validity of the coding as long as the content loads fast and I find what I am looking for. We are living in an age of content and information. People do not really want to see good coding or even really good looking sites with flash and such, they want to quickly find what they are looking for.
Well, it seems that you are very concern about the HTML validation and designs and it's really true that a good website should have to be error free. But let me point out some thing. Most of the sites are dynamic sites these days with 1000 and 1000 of pages which generates dynamically. Correcting the HTML for these sites and making them error free is next of impossible. Now as far as the Google is concern, i have been associated with SEO from couple of years. And my friend let me tell you Google pays attention on Onpage solely. Yes but to retain the position of making it more better one can opt ofpage. But Google has always believed that "content is king".