Most websites are coded quite sloppily. Luckily the search engine bots and browsers are designed to deal with malformed code. However how do you know that all of your websites and all of your pages are being indexed properly? Is malformed code making the bot hiccup and causing you to lose valuable visitors?
Website validation
Run this test on any page of your website. Enter the URL of your website or page into this website code validator. See how many errors turn up.
OK, don’t panic. Most websites do not validate and some of the errors look worse than they are. It is smart though to try fixing the errors if possible. Often one error cascades creating many other errors so fixing one can result in far fewer errors.
Cleaning up the code
If the site is built with plain HTML then the cleanup is usually relatively simple. With content management systems or templates, it can be more difficult. Luckily most validate out of the box. The problems begin when you add plugins and templates and other modifications.
On this site for instance, it validate if I remove one plugin but I can’t hack that one plugin to make sure it validates. So I have probably gone as far as I can unless I find another plugin to do the same thing. Thankfully that plugin does not affect bots crawling the pages. Writers of plugins and themes in general code for functionality but rarely does their code validate.
Checking if there are indexing problems
You can make sure the bots are not having problems by checking to see if all your pages are being indexed. You can use the site: command in Google but it is not comprehensive. Yahoo Site Explorer is a much better option. Check the list of pages indexed here with the list you have of your pages on your website and they should match.
Google Webmaster Tools is another excellent place to make sure your pages are not having problems.
If you are hiring a designer, you can always check the quality of their work independently. If their code validates, you know you have a good quality coder.It isn’t essential that all code validates but it certainly is a sign of quality and care if it does.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I notice that Webmasters Tools sometimes reports errors that I can’t reproduce. Overall though, I think it gives you a great heads up with indexing problems as well as providing lots of other useful information.
John
Hi John,
That’s interesting. What kind of errors? I know it lags a bit before it reflects the fixes that I have made but I haven’t come across reported errors that I can’t track down.
I aim to get my sites’ code to validate and then use Webmaster tools to make sure I didn’t miss any meta tags. That usually does the trick.
Plugins are what screw that up most of the time so I try to minimize the number of plugins I use. 99% of problems with WordPress are plugins.
good tips. will apply it on my blog