SEO - HTML/XHTML Validation

Why validate a document?

The whole reason for validating a document is to free it of potential errors. By doing this, a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Programmer can eradicate the possibility of unexpected output to viewers of your web page. Another benefit of validation is that it future proofs the X/HTML, web pages may look different in different browsers if not validated properly.

A major point to consider is that web spiders crawling your web page will stop at errors in your X/HTML, this in turn slows them down. If they only have a certain amount of time to crawl your site, you will not get the full content of your web page analysed.

What does validation do?

Validation highlights problems within the X/HTML of a web page. Typical examples of errors are; misspelled and invalid tag’s and tag names, missing extra tags and broken links. All of these are very important and need to be corrected. Many browsers are not Standards Compliant which means they can smooth over errors in the code but still display the web page correctly. This means the web page may look fine, but in actual fact is very poor from an SEO point of view.

Summary

The overall goal of validation is to help the search engines spider your web page, in turn boosting your ranking. If a number of errors are found within the web page it is harder for spiders to crawl, which in turn does not help yourselves.