Based on a conversation I had today in the SEO section of DP (http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1156436), I have decided to make my web site W3C compliant. This is something I have considered for a while now, but have avoided it because I don't know much about it, and have a bit of a fear of the unknown. Now, I have run my web site through the validator at http://validator.w3.org/. I see that I have 9 errors and 3 warnings. I am willing to study up about how to remedy these on my own. That is not the question I would like to ask. The question I have is if there are any errors/warnings that I shouldn't bother fixing. For instance, I ran validation on a couple of the sites from the thread I linked above to gain a point of reference, and see that 'no document declaration' seems to be a common error. Should I fix each and every error, or are there some that are not worth spending time on? It is my guess that any and all errors and warnings should be fixed, but I don't want to waste time on an issue that won't really make a difference. Forgive these questions if they seem elementary. This is my first try at site validation. I feel like it's a good idea to get my code cleaned up, even though we have solid organic rankings. Any help is greatly appreciated!
Well, it relaly depends to what extent you want to be 'W3C Complaint', of couurse you won't be able to display the badges on your site and call yourself 'truly' compliant unless everything is how it should be. Things like the Document type take literally seconds to fix, to me i'd go through the effort of fixing the errors. It doesn't really have an effect on SEO (although a handful of people think it does), so it's really up to you.
I believe I am catering more to my 'perfectionist' tendencies. I am tired of becoming personally offended when people talk badly about code-defficient web design. I am more interested in disproving its effect on SEO, so I can post true findings on the matter. Funny, one of the people bashing others in the thread, calling them idiots basically, for not having perfect code has 70 errors and 12 warnings...much worse than mine. Go figure! I really appreciate your thoughts. I will correct all issues, no matter how small.
Looking at the first link in your sig: The doctype declaration is optional, but performs two important functions. First, it tells the validator which specs to check the document against. Second, and actually critical, is its function as a rendering mode trigger. An incomplete DTD causes browsers to render in quirks mode, where IE acts like IE5. Be sure to trigger standards mode on every page you refactor to bring into the post 2001 world. line 10; The / before the closing bracket is not proper for html, and since it's not within the quotes, it's an invalid character entity. line 24; You have a quote between shortcut and icon, which throws everything out of sequence. The rest should be obvious. BTW, search engines index the alt text. There are some goofballs on that other thread. I would not pay them any mind on SEO or validity of markup. Think of validation as assurance that you are using good grammar (syntax). It is more important to use well structured, semantic markup. It doesn't hurt that your markup actually says to the machine what you want it to mean. cheers, gary
Never really looked into this stuff, but I plan on doing so for my new sites. My older sites were arcade/video oriented, and, tbo, they were mostly about testing click/hop conversions. The thing is, I knew that the code was really bad (very meta, way too big of landing pages, etc). So, for blank and giggles I ran the site in my sig through the validator you listed. "12583 Errors, 1047 warning(s) " Do I get a trophy for that one?
Well that's the most errors i've ever seen when a site has been ran through the validator. I'd imagine you'd get rid of a lot of errors if you changed the Doc Type from 4.01 to 1.0 and changed the character type to UTF-8. Replace this: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <link rel="icon" href="http://xenocidal.com/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" /> <link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://xenocidal.com/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" /> <meta name="description" content="Online flash arcade full of your favorite games and anime episodes. Yea Hoo!"> <meta name="keywords" content="anime episodes, watch anime, flash arcade,arcade games, flash games, online games"> <title>Anime Episodes | Watch Anime</title> <link rel="StyleSheet" href="http://www.xenocidal.com/templates/style.css" type="text/css" media="screen"> <script src="http://www.xenocidal.com/templates/arcade.js" type="text/javascript"></script> </head> Code (markup): With this: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <head> <link rel="icon" href="http://xenocidal.com/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" /> <link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://xenocidal.com/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" /> <meta name="description" content="Online flash arcade full of your favorite games and anime episodes. Yea Hoo!"> <meta name="keywords" content="anime episodes, watch anime, flash arcade,arcade games, flash games, online games"> <title>Anime Episodes | Watch Anime</title> <link rel="StyleSheet" href="http://www.xenocidal.com/templates/style.css" type="text/css" media="screen"> <script src="http://www.xenocidal.com/templates/arcade.js" type="text/javascript"></script> </head> Code (markup): Let's see how many errors you can get rid of.