SEO: Are You Valid?
Sounds weird, huh? Are you valid? Well, of course, I’m not talking about YOU, you… I’m talking about your web pages.
What is validation?
There are several places where you can go to have the code on your web page validated. The one I use, and the standard is http://validator.w3.org/
When you run your code through there, using your URL, via file upload, or by direct input, you’ll be amazed to find all the things that can make a spider stop or run.
Just for the heck of it, I ran http://EasyBlogTricks.com through and came back with 72 errors! Hmm… I might be fixing code this weekend.
Here are some of the issues:
- there is no attribute “name”
- there is no attribute “src”
- there is no attribute “width”
- there is no attribute “height”
And so on… I won’t bore you with all of them. But you can see how little things like leaving off a tag can make your HTML invalid. Crap. This is a mess!
And why is that important? Well… the cleaner your code is, the easier it is for the spiders to navigate. Still, it’s not critical. Search engines really care that you have good, unique content, and though they may not get through every bit of your page, they’re pretty smart. They can figure out what the page is about and index and rank it, anyway.
Yet, if you really want the spiders to crawl all the way to the bottom… Let’s say you have important stuff after all the messy code, then, you may want to rethink and retool. Use W3C to see what your errors are and whether or not they’re important enough to spend time fixing.
Just don’t lose any sleep over it.
Edward Moore
March 11th, 2009 at 11:34 am #
Pat,
Thanks again for this great information to help us all with our code.
This is a great tool and I have bookmarked it to use over and over again. I checked just 2 of my sites and found 6~12 errors on each of them.
So, when you embed a YouTube video and don’t have “scr=” does that stop the spiders or create less validity?
Thanks for all your help,
Edward Moore
http://twitter.com/EdwardMoore
Pat Marcello
March 11th, 2009 at 5:49 pm #
Any incomplete tags like that will. But like I mentioned in my post, it’s nothing to lose sleep over. Except if you complete the scr=”name” you can always fill it in. But I’m not sure what you mean in relation to YouTube video. I don’t see an scr in that tag, but there is Without that, you’ll have no video, so…
Where did you see it show up?
Pat
Edward Moore
March 12th, 2009 at 12:41 pm #
I have an embedded YouTube Video on several sites and have never had a problem and they show and play just fine.
Yesterday, when I went to W3C to check several sites, the first one told me I had an error with the ” at <embed src=”http://www…
The other errors were with ” as well, so wondering why they see it as an error?
Thanks for your help, as always,
Edward Moore
http://twitter.com/EdwardMoore
Nitesh
March 12th, 2009 at 4:06 pm #
I like the information you have written. It is really helpful because I am trying to run a website and this article really helps me.
Pat Marcello
March 12th, 2009 at 5:19 pm #
Not sure. That’s strange. I’ll have to do some checking for you. Get back to you on that.
The only thing I can think of is that they’re validating on the XHTML basis, which has slightly different rules than HTML. For example, in HTML is in XHTML. could be that.
– Pat
Rekha
March 18th, 2009 at 7:05 am #
Thanks for this information on checking out the errors in the site. Actually I am not a computer literate but I have created my website on home remedies with the help of blogger and the tips from people like you. Thanks and I will check the errors in my site using your tips.