Importance of valid markup for SEO?

Question

I know this question has been asked several times. But the answers seem to vary: some say its important for search engines, others say the SEO improvement is negligible. Can anyone please explain to me if it is worth the time to validate html, from an SEO perspective?

In other words, if a company with an existing site were to hire an SEO expert to optimize his/her site, would it be worth the extra money to have the expert make the code validate (assuming there are many errors currently)?

Update: I just came across this video on Youtube discussing why google.com does not validate. It mentions the Google does not give any sort of "boost" to sites with valid markup. While this makes sense, based on the responses I guess its still a good idea to validate code in case of severe errors...

Answer 1

Validate? Not so much. But broken html, such as an unclosed table would definitely some damage, albeit minor.

The game is still about inbound links. Time spent building inbound one-way links is far more valuable than validation.

Also take some time to analyze your navigation paths - keep links concrete, don't nest pages too deep, and always ensure you have no broken links.

Answer 2

There are several reasons to make your website W3C valid.

• Better chances for good rendering in different browsers.
• Decrease dependency on error correction of browsers.
• You could give a speed boost to your websites.
• A small group of users values good coding. Especially if your target audience are webmasters and scripters.

I read a long while ago that bad code can kill off your site and this was the example given:

Lets say your first paragraph is written for the search engines but you have made this simple mistake -

<p This is the text from my first paragraph and I have written it for search engines while keeping it still readable to humans and good to read</p>

Notice I have accidentally not closed the start tag for the <p>

According to the article i read, the search engines will not be able to read the content as it is supposed to be and will be interpreted as being part of the tag and therefore ignored. this is obviously a really bad thing. So with this in mind, this very basic mistake can be fixed by validating the html.

Simple yet it just goes to show what a little time and validation can do for a page.

But not only this

• Backlinks

• regular update

is also important

Answer 3

You can never be 100% sure. But ... if you assume the search engines parse valid HTML better than invalid HTML, doesn't it make sense that you should try for valid HTML? Despite the other benefits that would provide, if you're relying on a 3rd party (the search engine world) to provide revenue to your company I would want to make their job as easy and accurate as possible.

Answer 4

SEO is all about which keywords to target, how to layout a website, some basic rules to follow when writing, and that sort of thing. In the end quality inbound links from other web sites is what matters most for a good rank.

Website validation is overrated. It's well meaning, but overrated for SEO. You may have an audience that is visually impaired or regulations that you must validate, but this doesn't do much of anything for inbound links. Most HTML I write validates anyway, but I don't go out of my way to make it so.

Pretty much every browser has a "quirks" mode to deal with all the old html code out there. The most basic form of HTML is well understood by search engines.

If you're paying for SEO you want ways to better target keywords and that sort of thing. You may find SEO Fast Start worth a look, it's a free download (google it) and will give an overview of what a good SEO process looks like.