The Importance of Valid HTML Code
Many webmasters and newcomers to web page design overlook a crucial aspect of web site promotion, and that is the validity of the HTML code. What is valid HTML code? Most web pages are written in the language of HTML. As is true for every language, HTML has its own grammar, vocabulary and syntax, and each page written in HTML is required to follow these rules. Like any language, HTML constantly changes. As HTML has become a relatively complex language, it’s quite simple, and common, to make errors.
HTML code that is not following the official rules is called invalid HTML code. Search engines have to parse the HTML code of your web site to find the relevant content. If your HTML code contains errors, search engines might not be able to find the content on the page, and there, in the very skeletal structure of your website, ends your SEO efforts for high rankings of that page. Search engine crawler programs obey HTML standards. They only can index your web site if it is compliant to the HTML standard.
Most of the major search engines can handle and understand minor errors in HTML code, but a single missing bracket in your HTML code might be the reason your website can’t be found in search engines. If you don’t close some tags properly, or if some important tags are missing, search engines might completely ignore the content of that page.
How can you check the validity of your HTML code? Fortunately, there are free services that allow you to check the validity of your HTML code. The search engine optimization community’s HTML validator is the W3C HTML Validator . Valid HTML code makes it much easier for search engines to index your website so you ensure that at the most glaring mistakes in your HTML code are corrected
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