I am creating a website right now and I would like to know if the w3c Markup Validation Service at http://validator.w3.org/ is a tool to know if the website Im creating is google friendly.
Google doesn't care to much about code of your site unless you try to use some black hat seo tricks in your html. They are interested in content the most, some balance between real content and code amount etc...
Thank grg, the reson why I asked this is because I read an article at Google help center...click this help link ...saying that "Use a text browser, such as Lynx, to examine your site. Most spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Macromedia Flash keep you from seeing your entire site in a text browser, then spiders may have trouble crawling it." My field is far from webdesign and I just learned cms and php 4 days ago and relies on tools and this forum to create a website... I just dont know how to create a site which is google friendly... How will I know if my site is google friendly... Is the w3c validator a tool for this..thank you
Again - no, the w3c validator is not a tool for this. As Google suggests, search for and download Lynx.
You don't have to validate your pages to any standard. Google's crawler is intelligent enough to figure out what your site is all about. Make the site as clean as possible. Avoid using too many flash or images or html codes. Use CSS instead. Google pays a lot of attention to what other sites say about your site, which is the link building part of SEO. No matter how friendly your site is to Google, your site won't get good rankings unless it has external links.
Google does not count w3c validation BUT if you have no knowledge of what w3c mark up is about it would be easy to accidently creat a website that may seem to the search engine unethical seoing My advice, if you have no knowledge of website design, is to follow the w3c accessibility rules. This will help you create a website laid out in fundamental progressive webdesign rules. There are lots of sites out there that test for accessibility rules such as http://www.sidar.org/hera/ http://webxact.watchfire.com/ Although if you use a Content Management System you will find reaching these standards harder than if you coded the site yourself through something like Dreamweaver.
Yep i would stick with lynx. Alternatively code in pure HTML, PHPorusea wordpress theme all of which can be easily configured to please Google. Have to be honest whilst getting title tags, keyword tags, description tags, and using a logical site linking structure are important, i've seen lots of very unappealing websites that seem to have done well simply because their content is excellent.