W3C Compliant Code
a bigger isue than most people know
Today;s Internet Browser Software like Internet Explorer amd FireFox are very forgiving platforms. They will do their best to display a website even when it is chock full of html errors or non-compliant to the latest W3C standards.
The lowest form of "browser" out there is the search engine. The search engine is about as basic as browsere released in 80's. It can't read flash, DHTML, JavaScript, dynamic pages, - even having trouble at times with frames. Search engines often have difficulty crawling, indexing, and extracting content from websites that may work just fine aon all the common browsers, but crash the serach engine crawler.
If you want your site listed on search engines then make sure that you have correct HTML code. Many search engines cannot properly catalog or index a site that has HTML errors. This can greatly reduce the amount of traffic your web site receives from search engines. Search engines score a page by looking for relevant terms in key HTML components in specific places within a document. These key components are titles, descriptions, visible text, alt image tags etc. If they don't find them because of typos or other mistakes, the spiders may leave without reading the content of the page.
This issue is more common than you would guess. To test your current site design, use the tool located at: http://validator.w3.org/
Most web designers simply test their designs for operability within a handful of browsers, once they find the site is functuioning, move on to the next project. This lack of follow-through can cause your site to forever rank poorly as the search engine spiders may crash and burn every time they attempt tio index your site.
If you create the page properly and have content that contains your keywords it "should" get read and picked up by the search engines. (off page factors like inbound links excluded) However if you have a simple error like an open tag <p - missing the closing bracket of the paragraph tag when the search engine reads the page it assumes that all of the content - search engine optimized or not - is an attribute of the paragraph tag. So the search engine just ignores all of the content in that paragraph. This could be an even bigger goof than a typo in the title and could very well cost you a good ranking.
By Terry Mickelson
Written by Terry Mickelson, President of PageViews, Inc. Search Engine Marketing and Optimization Company based in metro Phoenix. For a free report to see where your site ranks in the search engines go to http://www.pageviews.com/freeanalysis.html PageViews can be reached at 480-556-9752 or
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