|
Why valid HTML code is important
to your web site
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 relative 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 only can index your web site if it is compliant to
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.
How can you check the validity of your HTML code?
Fortunately, there are free services that allow you to
check the validity of your HTML code. The most common HTML
validator is the W3
HTML Validator.
It is a service that checks HTML documents for conformance
to W3C HTML and XHTML recommendations and other HTML standards.
Just enter the address of a web page on this
page and the validator will tell you what errors are
on 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.
|
