The validity of the HTML code is a very important aspect of web site promotion, but many webmasters overlooked it.
Do you know what is valid HTML code?
Most web pages are written in HTML. Every document written in HTML is supposed to follow these rules because HTML has its own grammar, vocabulary and syntax like very language.
Those does not follow the official rules is called invalid HTML code. HTML is constantly changing like any language. It’s very easy to make mistakes as HTML has become a relative complex language.
Why is valid HTML code important?
Search engines will find the relevant content of your web site via parsing the HTML code. If there is errors in your HTML code, search engines might not be able to find everything on the page.
The crawler programs of search engine obey the HTML standard. Only if your pages are compliant to the HTML standard can they index your site. Make sure that there is no mistake in your web page code, or they might stop crawling your web site and lose what they’ve collected so far because of the error.
Although most major search engines can deal with minor errors in HTML code, a single missing bracket in your HTML code can be the reason if your web page cannot be found in search engines.
If you miss some important tags, of close some tags improperly, search engines might ignore the complete content of that page.
How can you check the validity of your HTML code?
Luckily, you can have free services to check the validity of your HTML code. The most common HTML validator is the W3 HTML Validator.
It is a service to check HTML documents for conformance to W3C HTML and XHTML recommendations and other HTML standards.
The validator will tell your what errors are on the page when you enter the address of a web page on this page.
Although not all HTML errors will cause problems for your search engine rankings, some of them can keep web spiders from indexing your web pages.
Valid HTML code is very helpful for search engine spiders to index your site, so you should be sure that you have corrected the biggest mistakes in HTML code.
Indeed the cleaner the code the better and pure CSS the best of all. If you inherit code that is an absolute dogs dinner though its not always a disaster and there are plenty of techniques available to get you out of a fix such as pulling css and javascript into external files and adding in nicely coded content as an antidote to the spaghetti already in there.
Very interesting, I always assumed if the code was incorrect it simply didn’t work. I mean if you add something with code on the html side of posting a blog post and hit publish it tells you something is wrong and in fact won’t publish it. So, even with that; we might have errors?
I assume that broken html links also hurt when you are being crawled.
I think a website with code errors is the same as a person that speaks and you can’t understand what is saying. Internet has it’s own language so designers must learn it. It’s amazing how many dirty code is out there.