By Courtney Mills
Expert Author
Article Date: 2011-05-17
The official rules for writing HTML are defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). If you don't follow these rules for your website, will you be penalized by the search engines?
Although it doesn't have a direct impact on Google rankings, W3C validation is incredibly important for browser compatibility and overall site usability.
Google's Matt Cutts explains more in the video below.
Google crawls all sites, irrespective of coding. But there are some occurrences where sites aren't indexed because of syntax errors.
If you're website passes W3C validation then it will be very clean coded and most importantly easy will be easy to update in the future.
To help webmasters ensure their websites coding is correct, W3C has provided a number of free online validation tools. Here is a list of these tools and some others from 3rd party providers:
While the tools provided by W3C are likely to be the most accurate, I would also suggest testing your site with the online tools provided by 3rd parties, just to be thorough. If there is any discrepancy between the results, then it might pay to take a closer look at your HTML code.
If all of this content is flying over your head, then I would suggest sourcing a website developer/coder to take a look at your site.
In an effort to judge site authority and quality, its likely that Google will include W3C validity in their algorithm in the future; so now would be the time to get your code up to scratch.
About the Author:
Courtney is an online marketing specialist at ineedhits - a leading search engine marketing firm with over 11 years experience. Courtney has been living and breathing marketing for over 2 years and specializes in web and permission email marketing and providing news and opinion to online marketing communities.
By Courtney Mills