Why is it important to Validate your website?

Google cares about your code, and gives a higher Google PageRank to websites that meet current standards!  The Html code used to make your website has evolved over many years. As new web browsers are released they adhear to the most recent code standards.

What does the W3C Validator Check?

This validator checks the markup validity of Web documents in HTML, XHTML, SMIL, MathML, etc. If you wish to validate specific content such as RSS/Atom feeds or CSS stylesheets, MobileOK content, or to find broken links, there are other validators and toolsavailable.

How do I Validate my website?

Go to the W3C Markup Validation Service to check your website.

W3c.org Website Validation

Summary

1. When your Browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Crome, etc) sees errors on the page, they skip over the code that has the error.
2. When a Search Engine crawls your website and runs into an error it skips over the error, but it also skips over the text on your page where the error was found.  This means not all of the content on your page is getting indexed in the Search Engines.
3. A webpage that meets current standards, on average, takes 60% less Html code than older standards.  This means when Google crawls a webpage that meets current standards, they don't have to sift through as much code to find the text that is displayed on your page.  Think about it?  If you are Google, scanning millions of webpages each day, and if you could reduce your scanning time by 60%, you would want ALL websites to adhear to these new standards.  Google rewards good coding with higher PageRank.
4. If you valdate your website and find your pages have several errors on each page, it probably means your website was built using tools that don't meet today's standards. It would be an expensive task to manually fix all the errors. A better solution would be to migrate your website into a Content Management System, like Site Ninja. Site Ninja meets current standards.

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This article composed by Michael Kramer, Ameravant Web Design