Importance of Valid Coding for Search Engine Optimization

Importance of Valid Coding in Search Engine Optimization

by Bill Marshall
of http://www.oyster-web.co.uk

Last updated: 11 Sep 2007

Here at Oyster Web we see a lot of websites, and the first thing that strikes us about most of them is how poorly most of them have been put together. It's a rare event to find one that validates completely, and very few get away with less than 10 errors per page. Often the site owners who call us are shocked to hear that their sometimes brand-new sites have such errors.

I've been building websites since 1994 and over the years I've read thousands of discussion group and usenet messages on the topic of validation and cross-browser compatibility. Some of those messages were by amateur web designers and I can understand why many of them turn a blind eye to the time-consuming and seemingly irrelevant process of getting a site to validate. Even for an experienced coder it can be a tedious and frustrating task, and very often the site looks exactly the same in your favourite browser as it did at the beginning. Professional designers, particulalry those working from scratch, should know better, but it seems that many of them have the same cavalier attitude to validation. So why go to the trouble of validation? Lets look at the history.

The Background to the Problem

We've all run into problems at times making a site look good in more than one browser - if you've been in this business more than a couple of years you'll remember the nightmares of the browser wars where Microsoft and Netscape constantly brought out proprietory features to make their browser the most popular and there was at least two ways to do just about everything. Even after Microsoft won that battle we still had to deal with a reasonable proportion of Netscape 4 usage at a time when code was getting ever more complicated. Thankfully NN4 is now as near dead as matters but we now have a similar problem with Internet Explorer - they don't follow the W3C standards and sites can look very different depending on how they are designed and tested. Currently Mozilla's Firefox browser along with Opera are probably the two most standards compliant browsers available, while IE6 and even more so IE5 tend to make some serious errors in layout - partly by trying to be as backwardly compatible as they can with the old proprietory tags, but also by failing to follow the correct implementation of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

Faced with this situation the only logical thing to do is base your code on the standards and work from there.

The Benefits of Valid and Clear Code for Designers

The more your code is built on the standards produced by the W3C the easier it is to predict how different browsers will react to it, and the less you'll need to resort to hacks and workarounds. It will also be a lot easier to debug when things go wrong or to further develop when the site is expanded. Validation, far from being a problem, actually gives us tools to make our code more standards compliant. You can validate on-line at http://validator.w3.org/ and be sent a report on what the problems are, or there are tools built in to design prgrams such as Dreamweaver which will undertake the task, or there are extensions available for Firefox which will give a validation report in the browser at the click of a button.

Part 2 of Validation and its importance to Search Engine Optimisation

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