How to Validate Your HTML Code

Validate me!

Yep, sometimes we all need validation even our website code should be good and valid.

What does that mean?

According to W3C Schools:

What is Markup Validation?

Most pages on the World Wide Web are written in computer languages (such as HTML) that allow Web authors to structure text, add multimedia content, and specify what appearance, or style, the result should have.

As for every language, these have their own grammar, vocabulary and syntax, and every document written with these computer languages are supposed to follow these rules. The (X)HTML languages, for all versions up to XHTML 1.1, are using machine-readable grammars called DTDs, a mechanism inherited from SGML.

However, Just as texts in a natural language can include spelling or grammar errors, documents using Markup languages may (for various reasons) not be following these rules. The process of verifying whether a document actually follows the rules for the language(s) it uses is called validation, and the tool used for that is a validator. A document that passes this process with success is called valid.

With these concepts in mind, we can define "markup validation" as the process of checking a Web document against the grammar (generally a DTD) it claims to be using.

Bleh... All that to say that validating your code does not make your page better than another BUT it may perform better!

In Search Engine Optimization there may be upwards of 200 things that determine whether or not your site gets posted high in the rankings of a pertinent search. The more of those 200 things you can correctly implement in your page's code, the higher you will appear in the search rankings. Clean, valid code is one of those things. It simply gives you a better chance to climb Google's search engine results.

All that being said... there are MANY factors that effect SEO. It all seems like a great deal of magic and the truth is that it changes all the time... Google will publish new aspects of their algorithm all the time and being a true SEO expert means staying up on all of those changes (or hiring someone who does.)

In case you were wondering... this web page is W3C validated.

The easiest way to make certain that your website code is valid is to visit the Markup Validation Service and enter the URL of the page you wish to validate in the first field on that page. It is so simple and if your page is valid by their standards, you will receive a message like, "This document was successfully checked as *****! If you get errors or warnings, these ought to be provided to your web designer in order to fix them. You will thank me in the long run.