SEO Lion’s Blog

Using the w3c validation tool to fine tune your code

I had explained few points on basic on-page optimization in my earlier post. Keeping the targeted keywords in important locations such as title tag, meta tags, alt attributes is very important in order to convey what a page speaks about to the search engine crawlers.

Above this its very important for a web developer/SEO to stick to the correct HTML coding standards for better visibility of a web page.

Let me explain why..

Search engine crawlers are just programs created by human beings to read the content from pages and index them. It is programmed to read content from pages based on the common HTML coding conventions. They do not possess high end artificial intelligence to distinguish the tags which is improperly coded. So it is very important for anybody to validate the HTML code for the pages which is meant for search engine optimization.

The World Wide Web consortium is the organization that has set coding standards for the web development languages such as HTML, XHTML etc. Hence they have also provided some tools to validate the code developed by us and match it to the standards.

The validation tool can be located at http://validator.w3.org/ .

You can use this tool in 3 different ways to validate your HTML code – by inputting the URL of the page, by uploading the file from your system to the w3c tool, or by direct input i.e copy-pasting the HTML source code into the text area provided in the tool.

This tool gives a consolidated report pointing the errors on the page, which can be corrected.