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The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) sets the standards for coding HTML and CSS for web pages. They also provide tools to validate your code for free. In my opinion the first thing regarding these standards is browser compatibility: ensuring the page looks the same in all of the different browsers, new and old. Not all valid pages will look the same across all browsers, but it is a good starting point for troubleshooting. If your pages look great in all browsers except IE6 (as often the case), the first place to check is the W3C page checker. Sometimes you can leave an open tag and newer browsers can handle it, but IE6 will break. The validator will catch that for you. If you build solid, valid code, you have less to check when testing.
If you’re concerned at all with search engine optimization (SEO), and you probably should be, validating your source code can prove useful…but is it a necessity? The answer is two-fold. Well more like a piece of origami.
Your content and organization therein using good web practices is the main factor in SEO, plain and simple. However there is a lot of discussion surrounding the importance of validated code in SEO. Much of the argument lies between the valid code having either a direct or in-direct boost to the overall SEO. It seems there are many areas where it can have an in-direct relationship to the SEO. If there is less (erroneous) code it can be indexed easier and faster by Google. Removing that excess code increases the text to code ratio. So whatever the page is relevant to just becomes more relevant. With valid code, just like a human, a web spider will have a better time crawling your information. Code validation shows serious professional approach of the company and skills of the team in particular. The bottom line is that it can only help. But how much time should you spend on code validation? There is only so much that it can offer, as spiders’ web crawling abilities are constantly evolving, just as browsers are evolving. They are evolving to understand and disregard our small errors, and increasing their understanding on how we communicate as we give and receive information on this Internet.
It is safe to say validation doesn’t have a direct effect on relevance (SEO). Having your site validate shows that you’ve done the job to the best level that you can, and it’s usually those type of people that ‘tend’ to do better at what they’re trying do achieve including SEO.
