What Google Thinks About Your HTML

HTML, it’s the foundation of your website. It doesn’t matter what type of website you’re running, if your HTML doesn’t work, then your rankings will be affected! Here’s why, there are so many different combinations of computers, operating systems, browsers and Internet speeds the only way to be sure your site is working properly all of the time (or at least most of the time) is to make sure your HTML is as close as possible to being W3C compliant.

Here’s the challenge to having clean or compliant HTML, once you start coding your project (adding scripting such as PHP, JSP or JavaScript) the HTML becomes less important. Especially if you’re using WYSIWYG HTML editors like Dreamweaver of FrontPage. These are notoriously bad HTML programs even though they seem so easy to use. Beware, there is a trade off, and that trade off is ultimately the poor quality of your websites HTML. Back to coding, when you’re in the coding stages of web development an important thing to have in order to ensure quality assurance is an HTML spot check every now and then. The best part is anyone can do this and it’s absolutely free by going to http://validator.w3.org and pasting or typing in the URL of the page you want to check.

Some of the most common errors you may find when using the W3C HTML validator will be little things like no alt tags, long URL strings and Flash movies or objects like navigation. These can be cleaned up with relative ease and shouldn’t be any reason to get worried. However, if your seeing problems such as XHTML errors or DOCTYPE declaration, then you may have a more serious problem that can come back to bite you when you start to optimize your website. Learn more at: http://www.irepagent.com

Another way to find errors and optimize your HTML is to follow Google’s sitemap guidelines; Google has some great tools that will show you where the problems are with your HTML and let you know when you have been properly corrected your websites HTML issues. You can get the Google sitemap admin for free at http://www.google.com/webmasters/start. And the answer to the question "what Google thinks of your HTML" can be answered in the Google sitemap admin.

Key Tip...
With regard to meta tags; yes they are still relevant, you want to include them in the top of your web pages just below the title tag. Specifically the "keyword" and "description" tags. They may not help to get your site ranked, but Google will notice when they are not present.