HTML Validation: Being Friendly to Search Engines & Browsers Bookmark Links

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* Is your Website taking a long time to load?
* Does it appear incorrectly on some browsers?
* Is it not displayed in some browsers?

If your answer is yes to any or all of these questions, then consider validating your site's HTML code. HTML validation is the process of analyzing HTML code for its compliance with HTML standards and identifying code errors.
Benefits of HTML Validation

Wide Accessibility
Are your Web pages written for all the major browsers? There was a time when Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator were the only browsers available. Now there are many browsers competing each other for greater market share. Only the sites that are HTML standard-compliant will appear properly on all browsers.

Validating your HTML code with a HTML Validator tool will increase the accessibility of your site through all the major browsers. This, in turn, will increase the number of visitors to your site.

Faster Loading

HTML validation finds out the errors in the HTML code and enables you to correct those errors. This will make the page download faster. Pages with HTML errors will take longer time to load. We must remember that users have no time to waste or wait. If a page takes longer time to download, users turn away to some competitor's site. Ultimately, you lose potential customers and revenue.

Search Engine Friendly

HTML validation identifies the errors in your pages that can act as stumbling blocks for search engine spiders. Rectifying these errors will help increase your site's ranking on search engines. Some of the prominent ways in which HTML Validation helps in making you pages search engine friendly are:

* It finds out the HTML errors that cause a longer loading time. Generally, the search engines find it difficult to index pages that load slowly.
* It checks whether the META tags are written properly. Improper tags can confuse the spiders and they may not be able to spot the right keywords.
* It suggests changes, such as adding alt messages to images, which help increase the keyword density in your page and the search engine ranking.

HTML validation is an essential part of search engine optimization. Failing to validate your site's HTML code may make your site slow to load, appear incorrectly on different browsers, and rank low on search engines. Therefore, it is better to validate HTML code before submitting a site to search engines.

Darren Smith - 30th August 2005
Search Engine Friendly

* Common SEO Terminology

Related Search Engine Optimization Tools

* Meta Tag Analyzer
* HTML Validator
* Code Cleaner