<-- Resources
Make Search Engines Love You
by Andrew Nielsen
If you have a website or blog relying on HTML webpages, you can rank higher in search results, simply by ensuring that your HTML is tidy and adheres to the specifications. In this article we describe why this is so and how you can check the correctness of your pages.
HTML is a language used for writing webpages. It is a kind of encoding which allows that a webpage is sent across the internet as text to your browser. Your browser can then parse the contents and build the webpage before displaying it to you in your browser. The parsing and decoding determines the layout of the page and results in formatting of the text. You can view the source of the page you are reading now, but selecting the ‘View’ menu and then ‘Source’ (depending on your browser and language).
HTML has evolved over time, to meet the requirements which have appeared for it and now exists in many versions. Your browser has been programmed to parse and decode HTML in different versions and thus allows you to view the webpages you visit.
On the web, there are millions and millions of pages which do not adhere exactly to the specification of HTML. This happens because the creators of the webpages have not taken care – or not cared – about creating the pages according to specifications. When your browser encounters a page not adhering to the specification it cannot know how to format the page. It is a bit like a book filled with typos – you can’t always know what the correct meaning of each word is and thus what a sentence is meant to say. So what should the browser do when it parses such pages?
If the designers simply decided to show an error message and no content for pages with errors on them, a lot of pages would not be shown. And such a browser would obviously not be very popular. So browsers are generally designed, so they try to correct pages with errors and show them as best they can. Such functionality significantly adds complexity to the development of browsers.
The designers of search engines are faced with a similar problem. If a page does not conform to the specifications, it can be difficult to parse the page and determine what the important parts of it are and what it is supposed to look like for a visitor. As with the design of browsers, a lot of effort and resources go into making sure search engines can handle pages with errors. The companies behind search engines are therefore keen on encouraging that the pages they parse, do indeed adhere to the specifications. And they do this simply by penalizing pages with errors on them, by assigning a lower rank. All of them do it, Google, MSN, Yahoo! and all the smaller search engines too.
It is difficult to say exactly how big the penalty is in terms of rank and it varies from search engine to search engine. A few insignificant probably result in no penalty at all. But since it is easy to check and fix, keeping your house in order should be well worth it and boost your rank.
So how do you ensure that the search engines like your pages and your HTML?
The World Wide Web Consortium – abbreviated W3C – maintains specifications, guidelines and tools for HTML. By having a basic understanding of the specifications and checking your pages using their tools, you can quite easily determine how well you are doing in this respect. In the resources below, you can find links to W3C’s tool for checking HTML pages. There are plenty of other resources – including the specifications – available on their site.
Resources
To validate your webpage use the W3C HTML validation tool.
Andrew Nielsen is a consultant, internet entrepreneur and the author of The Online Business Builder.
Article source: Make Search Engines Love You
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