View Full Version : http://validator.w3.org How does it help?

Atlas
05-10-2004, 08:56 AM
Hi Y'all,

Trying "from scratch" to improve my site by going back to basics

Can any one help me on this - What is a the value of the

http://validator.w3.org seo tool?
does one have to make all code corrections theat it recommends- what is the most effective way for a code novice to utilise this tool to improve serps performance -

Thanks for the help
SPARKO
05-16-2004, 10:42 AM
ditto good question someone answer; obviously the better the code the better a robot will crawl but I think vertually all competitor number 1 sites I've tested on there has had circa 80-100 errors So is there much improvement>>?
jocelyn
05-16-2004, 11:02 AM
I tried a W3 validator and it busted me the DOCTYPE error from the start.
Searched a bit on it and couldn't get good input on what doctype to use and if it was that good.
Some say it's bull some say you need that... I just don't use it.
My site is French and English and would not like to use the wrong doctype.

I use : http://www.htmlvalidator.com/lite/

It did find a bunch of errors with my pages that SSI was causing...
Double <HTML>, <b> not closed... I fixed them and my pages got better rankings.
Some errors may stop Googlebot from finishing to index a page and keep some content out.
morgan
05-16-2004, 02:02 PM
Learning the w3 standards and building compliant pages is always a good idea just from a design perspective however from an SEO perspective I would not go trying to fix 5000 errors or 5000 pages as really I would say less then 1% of your competitors are compliant anyways. Just make the code as clean as you can and use something like the tool Joc pointed out to fix any glaring mistakes. But me personally I really dont care if I have empty alt="" for every one of my images that sort of thing is just tedious to have to add after the fact mind you I think you can have DW add it by default when inserting images so why not turn it on for new pages right?