Your website is ready. Your content is in place, you have
optimized your pages. What is the last thing you should do before uploading
your hard work? Validate. It is surprising how many people do not validate the
source code of their web pages before putting them online.
Search engine robots are automated programs that traverse the web, indexing
page content and following links. Robots are basic, and robots are definitely
not smart. Robots have the functionality of early generation browsers: they
don't understand frames; they can't do client-side image maps; many types
of dynamic pages are beyond them; they know nothing of JavaScript. Robots
can't really interact with your pages: they can't click on buttons, and they
can't enter passwords. In fact, they can only do the simplest of things on
your website: look at text and follow links. Your human visitors need clear,
easy-to-understand content and navigation on your pages; search engine robots
need that same kind of clarity.
Looking at what your visitors and the robots need, you can easily see how
making your website "search engine friendly", also makes the website
visitor friendly.
For example, one project I worked on had many validation problems. Because
of the huge number of errors generated by problems in the source code, the
search engine robots were unable to index the web page, and in particular,
a section of text with keyword phrases identified specifically for this page.
Ironically, human users had problems with the page as well. Since humans are
smart, they could work around the problem, but the robots could not. Fixing
the source code corrected the situation for human and automated visitors.
There are several tools available to check your HTML code. One of the easiest
to use is published by the W3C (http://validator.w3.org/). While you're there,
you can also validate your CSS code at W3C's page for CSS (http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/).
The reports will tell you what source code needs to be fixed on your web page.
One extra or unclosed tag can cause problems. With valid code, you make it
easier for your human visitors and search engine robots can travel through
your website and index your pages without source code errors stopping them
in their tracks. How many times have you visited a website, only to find something
broken when going through the web pages? Too many too count, I'm sure. Validating
your pages makes everything easier for your website to get noticed.
As I said before, what works for your website visitors works for the search
engine robots. Usability is the key for both your human visitors and automated
robots. Why not provide the best chance for optimum viewing by both?
-----------------
Daria Goetsch at Search Innovation
Daria Goetsch is the founder and Search Engine Marketing Consultant for Search Innovation
Marketing (http://www.searchinnovation.com), a Search
Engine Promotion company serving small businesses. Besides running her own company, Daria is an
associate of WebMama.com, an Internet web marketing strategies company. She has specialized in
search engine optimization since 1998, including three years as the Search Engine Specialist for
O'Reilly & Associates, a technical book publishing company.
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