Cairns, why you should validate your website.
We often get asked by owners, users and other web designers “our site looks right and works fine - isn't that enough, why bother with validation?”
The answer to this is that websites are built with markup languages, which are no more than data formats.
So really website’s don't actually look like anything at all until they are presented or displayed in a web browser such as Google Chrome or Internet Explorer.
Now the problem is that not everyone uses the same browser and different browsers can and do display the same page very differently.
This is deliberate, and doesn't imply any kind of browser bug, it’s just the way the browser’s have been designed to display different code and a term sometimes used for this is WYSINWOG - What You See Is Not What Others Get!
When there are errors in a web page, browsers typically try to compensate in different ways, some browsers may just ignore the website errors while others make assumptions about what the web designer was trying to achieve.
The problem is that when search engines obtain your page and try to parse them for keywords, they will also have to make certain decisions about what to do with the errors found in your website and like browsers, different search engines make different decisions about the errors in web pages, resulting in certain parts of your web page (or perhaps even the entire page if your error is early in the page code) not being indexed by search engines. –THIS IS NOT GOOD FOR SEO..........
The safest and best way to ensure that your site has a good opportunity to rank well in search engines such as Google is to make sure that your web page validates error-free, that way, there is no dispute about which part of your page should be scanned for keywords and the like, the search engines can find the key words and everybody is happy. – THIS IS GOOD FOR SEO.....
I guess there are still web designers that don’t understand this or can’t be bothered to do their work correctly, maybe they have their own ideas about the use of validation and as such leave their clients with web sites riddled with errors “but it display’s fine, so they see no problem with it”.
There is also the view that “Lots of websites out there don't validate - including household-name companies.”
Well that’s true!
But household-name companies expect people to visit because of the name and in spite of dreadful websites!
Are you a household name, can you afford that luxury of expecting people to visit you in spite of a poor website?
Even if you can afford to have a poorly coded website, do you really want to risk being on the wrong side of a lawsuit if your site proves inaccessible to - for example - a disabled person who cannot use a 'conventional' browser?
Accessibility is the law in many countries including Australia and whilst validation doesn't guarantee accessibility, it should be an important component of exercising "due diligence", In 2000 a court first awarded damages to a blind user against the owners of a website he found inaccessible (Maguire vs. SOCOG, August 2000) this law is even stronger today and web sites should be accessible to all, not many people know it, but that is not only common courtesy but it is the law of Australia.
At Cairns Webdesign and SEO we see validation as a solid building block from which to start SEO work, because if a part of a page or whole pages can’t be indexed, why even worry about good SEO?
