For my keywords I checked what was top of Google's searches and put their urls into the validation, most of them have lots of errors, obviously the less errors the better but how many errors should a site have before it has a bad effect? Is there a point where you say 'that's one too many' ? Lots of my errors on my sites are tags closing when they dont need to be closed (silly DW) and also from urls which I can't change, I have 137 on the index page in total which is less then a lot of sites I check. My pages get indexed quickly on Google tho, so should I be worried about it as they get indexed and everything? No preferance seems to be given in SERPS to sites with less errors then someone else, as long as they get indexed, right?
There is no evidence (that I've seen) that a a page validating has any effect on its ranking in the serps. You should be creating valid pages for other reasons, like consistent rendering across browsers and accessibility, though.
I use Dreamweaver which seems to cock up things as I don't know much html myself, also some of the errors are in urls I post which I can't change, I've checked my site in all browsers and it seems to work fine in them.
There are situations where a coding error will both prevent the page validating and stop the spider in its tracks (although spiders are generally tolerant of very poor coding). The main advantage in writing code which validates is that you know that the page will be spiderable, rather than having to guess which coding errors are serious. Have you tried the code validation function within Dreamweaver, which both brings up the invalid code and explains the nature of the error?
It varies a bit between versions of Dreamwweaver. In MX for example, it was on the main file menu in site view. In DW8 it is a button in the document toolbar above the main document window (the pane which displays the page in either design or code view). The validation interface gives the option to validate a single page, selected folders or the entire site.
Thanks, I think I have found it, can it correct it automatically? I don't seen an option or does it just bring up the errors and thats it? Cheers
No, it doesn't correct them automatically, but it does tell you what the error is - incorrect syntax, need to encode characters etc. - and usually how to correct it. There is also a facility in DW to automatically correct some coding errors - unclosed tags, nesting errors, redundant tags etc. - but it's a command called 'clean up HTML'.
Most of the errors I seem to get are things like 'The tag: "td" doesn't have an attribute: "background" in currently active versions.[HTML 4.0]' The line in question is <td width="4" valign="top" background="pimp_images/left_bg.gif" bgcolor="#F0F7FF" class="style1"></td>
hooperman is right, whether a page validates or not has no effect on its rankings in the search engines. Search engine rankings usually depend on the number and quality of sites linking to you.