Many webmasters overlook a very important aspect of web site promotion: the validity of the HTML code.
What is valid HTML code?
Most web pages are written in HTML. As for every language, HTML has its own grammar, vocabulary and syntax, and every document written in HTML is supposed to follow these rules. Like any language, HTML is constantly changing. As HTML has become a relatively complex language, it’s very easy to make mistakes. HTML code that is not following the official rules is called invalid HTML code.
Why is valid HTML code important?
Search engines have to parse the HTML code of your web site to find the relevant content. If your HTML code contains errors, search engines might not be able to find everything on the page. Search engine crawler programs obey the HTML standard. They can only index your web site if it is compliant with the HTML standard. If there’s a mistake in your web page code, they might stop crawling your web site and they might 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 don’t close some tags properly, or if some important tags are missing, search engines might ignore the complete content of that 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 makes it easier for search engine spiders to index your site so you should make sure that at least the biggest mistakes in your HTML code are corrected.
Checking Regulary Your Site Now
1. Does your web site consist of at least six individual web pages?
2. Does each of these web pages contain at least 200 words of visible text?
3. Do your web pages contain so much text content that it is easy for web surfers and search engines to find out what your web site is all about?
4. Are your web pages linked so that search engines and web surfers can find all web pages of your web site through the links on other pages of your site?
5. Do you have optimized at least four of your web pages for your keywords? Each web page should not be optimized for more than one or two keywords or key phrases.
6. Have you made sure that the HTML code of your web pages is valid so that search engines don’t have difficulty when they try to index your web site?
7. Have you removed frames wherever possible on your web site? It is very difficult to get high search engine rankings with a web site that uses frames.
8. Have you made sure that you don’t use a welcome page or intro page on your web site? Many search engines won’t be able to index your site if you use such a page.
9. Do you use as few Flash elements as possible? Search engines cannot index them properly.
10. Have you added some optimized static pages if your web site is dynamically created? Many search engines have difficulty with dynamically created web pages.
11. Do your web pages look attractive to human web surfers although they are optimized for search engines?
12. Would you go to your web site instead of a competitor web site if you were a web surfer?
13. Does your web site have its own domain name and is it hosted on a fast and reliable web server?
14. Could you tick all yes-boxes in the Find the right keywords checklist in the previous chapter?
* What can happen if you do not optimize your web pages?
If you do not optimize your web pages then search engines might not be able to index your pages. In addition, they might not be able to find our what your web pages are about. If you submit your web site to search engines without optimizing your pages first then you won’t get high search engine rankings.
* What can happen if you optimize only one web page of your site?
It will be very difficult to get high search engine rankings if you have only one optimized web page. Search engines take your complete web site into account. If you have many web pages that are optimized for different but related keywords than search engines will think that your web pages are relevant to a special topic. Relevant web pages get better search engine rankings. For that reason, you should optimize as many pages as possible for different but related keywords.
* What can happen if you don’t check the HTML code of your web pages?
Some HTML errors can prevent search engines from indexing your web pages. If your web pages have such an HTML error, you won’t get listed on search engines because search engines cannot index your pages. (Wait For Next Post)
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Good post, most SEO people forget about the importance of good html, it could be the difference between page one or page two results. FYI there is a handy tool at W3C to validate your Html. http://validator.w3.org/