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.

Related posts:

1. Validating HTML and CSS for SEO
2. Common HTML Validation Errors – Part II
3. The Finer points of Google Webmaster Tools
4. Custom 404 Error Pages
5. Whole Site Optimisation

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 3:21 pm and is filed under W3C and Search Engine Optimisation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.