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SEO Friendly HTML Code

Using Well Formed, W3C Validated HTML Code

When creating your web site you want to make sure that your HTML code is correct and well-formed.  Broken code can hamper the search engines ability to crawl your site.  Make sure that you have closed all tags which need to be closed and that you haven’t used source code which could “confuse” the search engine spider (such as old and outdated or which is proprietary to a single browser or code which is so new that it has not yet been recognized by most search engine spiders). 

Remember, search engine spiders are only computer programs with all the limitations that that implies.  They work according to a predefined, preprogrammed set of rules.  If your web pages don’t correspond to those rules then they run the risk of not being properly indexed by the search engines (or, worse, not being indexed at all)!  This can serious damage your sites rankings or, even potentially prevent your site from ranking at all.  None of your optimization techniques will matter if the search engines don’t index your site.  Therefore, it is worthwhile to make it as easy as possible for the searche ngine spiders to process the code on your web pages.  It allows the indexing process to work as smoothly as possible, thus allowing you to spend your optimization efforts where they most needed instead of worrying about technical, programming issues.

Thankfully, there is an easy way to help ensure that your HTML code is easy to process by the search engine spider — have it comply with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards.  You can easily test your web pages with the HTML validator at http://validator.w3.org.  If your site “validates” (i.e., you don’t get any errors) you can be confident that the search engines will be able to process your web pages.

Note:  in order for your pages to validate you will have to use a valid DOCTYPE.  In addition to helping to validate your site, a valid DOCTYPE is easier for search engines spiders to parse and easier for browsers to process.  As such, it both helps your optimization efforts as well as making your site compatible with a larger number of browsers. 

You should note that it will be easier to use the W3C HTML validator if your pages have a valid DOCTYPE. Not only are standards compliant pages with valid DOCTYPES generally easier for search engine spiders to parse, but they are also easier for browsers to process. This will result in a slight performance boost for your site and in your pages being compatible across a greater number of browsers.

You can learn more about DOCTYPEs by reading this tutorial.  To access it, click here!
 

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This tutorial written by:
Moshe Morris
President of SEMBasics
Chief Research Analyst at Internet Marketing Initiative (www.internetmi.com)

The content on this page is based off of an article published in SearchEngineNews.com.
To learn more about Search Engine News,
click here.