Archive for the ‘W3C and Search Engine Optimisation’ Category

Due to the success of my initial blog regarding HTML errors, I have decided to inform you of more W3c errors that are frequently ignored and that will increase the indexing and therefore rankings of your website.

These are slightly more complicated and may require external research, but feel free to get in touch if you would like your site completely optimising by one of the professional programmers here at SEO Consult.

required attribute “TYPE” not specified. – The most common occurrence of this fault is when you have used CSS or javascript and not declared it within your code. You should use a tag like this to solve this problem.

<script src=”scripts.js” type=”text/javascript”>// <![CDATA[

// ]]></script>

NET-enabling start-tag requires SHORTTAG YES or document type does not allow element “META” here. – This is a simple fix, you have specified that your document be formatted to HTML, HTML mark up does not allow / to close a tag. I.e.
should be changed to just
.

Missing xmlns attribute for element html. The value should be: http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml – This appears when you have created a HTML page and have failed to include the standard information. The best way to resolve this is to open a Dreamweaver HTML file, generating the right information as default, and then copy and paste into yours.

ID “exampleDiv” already defined.- When you see this error it is suggesting you have opened a div named exampleDiv, and then opened another div further on in the HTML code and called it the same name. The solution for this is to call all the duplicates

which will then sort out the problem.

Next time we can look at validation to Strict standards, this will be more successful but at the same time can be excruciatingly frustrating to clear.

Having a completely valid web page means additional crawling time and more frequent spidering. These two things can be the difference between a successful high converting website and an unreachable buried site that receives no traffic.

In simple terms these HTML errors, in line with the standard W3c Mark-up are aspects of coding that are not compliant with this standard, and therefore are seen as errors by the robots that crawl each and every website. The less errors, the easier a site is to crawl, the easier it is to crawl the more chance of the spider returning quickly and indexing you more regularly.

W3c errors are usually neglected by SEO’s and Web developers, some think that they only affect layout, whilst others don’t think they matter at all but as we have proven it is essential to clear them to at least a transitional level, the less stringent of XHTML Transitional and XHTML Strict (or HTML Transitional/ HTML Strict)

Here are some of the most common errors that web developers ignore.

required attribute “alt” not specified – All you need to do to correct this is put an ALT tag within every image tag.

XML Parsing Error: Opening and ending tag mismatch: table line 305 and tr – This means that there is an unclosed table row, it is applicable to divs, tables and td’s and can be very time consuming to find the problematic tag. On the plus side it can reduce multiple errors when corrected.

there is no attribute “HEIGHT” – In this case you are not allowed to call a height inside a table, the way to resolve this is by adding a style=”height:12px” within the table.

character “&” is the first character of a delimiter but occurred as data – Perhaps the most common of all is the easiest to fix, when you see this all you need to do is change the “&” to “&”. Simple!

There are of course many other variations of errors to irritate you, at SEO Consult we endeavour to clear every error as routine for all out SEO clients, if you would like a free analysis of your site please follow this link: Free SEO analysis.