Validating Your Page

Can someone explain to me why it is important to validate your HTML?

 

I believe it's just good practice, I dont know of any SEO reasons. Might help bots crawl your pages faster I dunno, or help ensure different browsers render your layout properly.

 

There are enough browsers out there that have problems consistently rendering valid html code. Even with valid code every browser might render the html code a little bit differently. If your code isn't valid then each browser will need to guess at what you were trying to do. Some browsers guess better than others.

So the biggest reason is to make it more likely that what you are looking at in your browser will be the most similar to what other people with different OS/browser combinations see.

 

I've had good luck with xhtml being rendered pretty consistantly

I like to use valid code.

 

I have heard or should I say read in various forums that good clean code will help your rankings. I don't have any proof of it but I have read it.

 

yes.. it was one of those unproven theory in seo.. but I believe validating it just for browser issues is beneficial in itself..

 

because it ensures your site will work better across all browsers and will rank better in search engines

 

This is a myth. Spiders don't care about W3C validation. And even browsers don't care about a number of features in W3C (e.g., the "deprecated" elements).

There is only one aspect of validation that will make any difference whatsoever and that is finding basic HTML errors like forgetting to close a tag. If those are taken care of, anything else won't affect SE ranking or spidering a bit.

 

Thanks for clairifying the myth. I guess I can continue to write crappy code for my sites then.

 

I also have some interest in this topic

I am not a programmer and do not have the expertise in this subject but
recently I came across an article from Brad Callen stating that Yahoo and MSN have placed a strong emphasis on clean code. He also explains that it helps with website maintenance do to the uniformity of the code.

Is anybody interested in earning some money by validating my website? Pm and I will give you all details.

Thanks,

Mike

 

"clean code" simply means error free code - to that extent it makes sense, because if you screw up something (e.g., missing closing tags, improperly nested tables or divs, that sort of thing) you run the risk of having the spiders miss some of your content.

However, "clean code" is not the same as W3C validated code... for example, spiders don't care whether you use <b> and <i> or <strong> and <em>, or whether you use any number of other elements deemed "deprecated" by W3C.