Page 62 - Professional Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

61 Professional Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

6.5.1 Do errors in your HTML code keep search engine spiders away?

Many webmasters overlook a very important aspect of website promotion: the
validity of the HTML code.

What is valid HTML code?
Most web pages are written in HTML. As for every language, HTML has its own
grammar, vocabulary and syntax, and every document written in HTML is supposed
to follow these rules.
Like any language, HTML is constantly changing. As HTML has become a relatively
complex language, it's very easy to make mistakes. HTML code that is not following
the official rules is called invalid HTML code.

Why is valid HTML code important?
Search engines have to parse the HTML code of your website to find the relevant
content. If your HTML code contains errors, search engines might not be able to find
everything on the page.
Search engine crawler programs obey the HTML standard. They can only index your
website if it is compliant with the HTML standard. If there's a mistake in your web
page code, they might stop crawling your website and they might lose what they've
collected so far because of the error.

Although most major search engines can deal with minor errors in HTML code,
a single missing bracket in your HTML code can be the reason if your web page
cannot be found in search engines.
If you don't close some tags properly, or if some important tags are missing,
search engines might ignore the complete content of that page.

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