SEO - Does Your Site Have Validity?

SEO - Does Your Site Have Validity?

Whether you have designed your own website or contracted that task out, you should check to see if your code has validity.

Validity or Validation for your site refers to the language in which it is written and if it is written correctly. Your site's code can be written in a variety of formats. Each of these formats is like a different language. When a portion of your site is written incorrectly, it is labeled as invalid.

How does this effect you and your website?

It will surely have a negative impact on your site in search engine rankings. Each piece of code that is not valid will be skipped over by the search engine bots that rank, judge, and sort websites. If the bots are skipping over your content every optimization statistic and effort will be less accurate and effective. A simple quotation mark in the wrong place or a property name being mislabeled can destroy lines of code and undo a lot of hard work.

Additionally, your site may not appear correctly in all browsers if not valid. By validating your site's code you are complying with the uniform rules of the language that your site has been written in.

How can you check to see if your site's code has validity?

This is the easy part! Go to the W3C Markup Validation Service Website: http://validator.w3.org/

Once here, type in your URL address. Your site's code will be analyzed by W3C's Validation Service, which will process a report for you. The report will point out each error in your code and give helpful suggestions to fix these issues.

Do not stop at your home page. Do each page of your website. Make sure to check your CSS as well. It is a mistake to submit your site to the search engines without taking this very important step.

I would also suggest using the "Clean up Markup with HTML Tidy" tool provided by the service while analyzing your site. This tool will clean up your code, which will make your site load faster and help the search engines crawl your site more efficiently.

Everything about this service is free! You will not even have to give an email address or subscribe to any special offers.

Once your site has been validated W3C's service will supply you with a graphic and link to their site, which if you choose to display it, shows everyone that your site has been validated.

I have one at the bottom of my site http://www.haseltine-photo.com/!