Trying to Validate HTML

error I don't understand

[Beach_lady]

Can someone help me please?
What does this mean?
document type does not allow element "P" here; missing one of "APPLET", "OBJECT", "MAP", "IFRAME", "BUTTON" start-tag
I am using <p> to start a new paragraph. I deleted all the </p> from the page since W3C says it is not needed. Help! Also if you don't use <font color="?"> or any of the other font tags what do you use in the place of it. Very Confusing!

[BarkerJr]

What version markup language (HTML?) are you coding in? Paste a few lines of code before and after the spot with the P error.

A replacement for the FONT tag is Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), or style="font-color:?".

[Birdman]

For starters, put all the closing paragraph tags</p> back. They are required since...well I don't know when, but it's been years I think.

And, as BarkerJr noted, it is important to know what document type definition you are using.

The CSS equivalent of FONT is actually style="color: #000000;", but you will learn how to define all that stuff in your external stylesheet and more after reading Nick_w's CSS Crash Course [webmasterworld.com].

Have fun!

[Beach_lady]

Thanks Birdman,
In reading on W3C Validate when I clicked on "explain" it says the closing tags for <p> are no longer required. That is why I took them off. I tried putting them back and it didn't make any difference.

[photon]

Whether or not the closing tags are required depends upon what DOCTYPE you're using. For example, XHTML 1.0 Strict does require them, HTML 4.01 Transitional does not.

If you can post the code from the line in question, as well as letting us know the DOCTYPE you're using, we can better figure out the issue.

[Beach_lady]

Hi,
I finally figured this out. It was a nesting problem that once corrected then everything else worked. There is just too much to learn. LOL but I'm trying. Thanks

[brucec]

Beach_lady, it is best to leave the </p>, because even though W3C says it is not necessary, it will be in the near future when HTML is phased out and XHTML will replace HTML and it will :)

Read the W3C requirements on XHTML and you will see that </p> is actually better.

Just for the record, I also coded aboput 3,000 web pages without the </p> and now I am going to pay for it. haha

[Beach_lady]

All this is very confusing. One place says don't do it and the next says do it. I change a code to what everyone told me and now I'm being told it is wrong. LOL I will put them back just in case. LOL Also I have tried validating the pages of the top sites on my search words and none of them validate. Half of them don't have document tags, content tags and they are loaded with errors. Some don't have any links at all but yet they are first on the page. These are sites that were done by professional companies. You would think they would have it right. I just don't understand the way of the web. I was always in the top five listings for any search word that was anywhere on my page (example: sailing sunsets I was #3 with two Carribean sites ahead of me) for a year and a half and at that time I had done nothing to try to validate, it was loaded with errors, no document tag or content tag. If anyone can explain the way this works let me know. My site now validates and has been resubmitted. Hopefully I will show up again.

[pageoneresults]

LOL Also I have tried validating the pages of the top sites on my search words and none of them validate.

Unfortunately I'd guess that 95% of the web does not validate. That puts us who do validate in a very tight knit niche market. Congratulations on joining the club! ;)

[Beach_lady]

"Unfortunately I'd guess that 95% of the web does not validate. That puts us who do validate in a very tight knit niche market. Congratulations on joining the club! ;)"

If they don't validate, how are they at the top of the search? Most of them have done nothing on the guidelines to put them there. Now when I do searches most of the results are really not what I searched for.

Will Validating help me get back to the front of the pack? I have also been trying to get related links by signing up to have my site listed on sites that offer a place for my type listing (vacation rental). That takes a lot of time but I try to do so many every day.

It seems these guys are doing good by doing it wrong!

I had to take off a lot of the things that I thought were nice because the shareware codes would not validate. Very confusing to a non computer person like me. I am trying hard to learn all I can though.

[DrDoc]

While a valid page is no guarantee to a well ranking site (since there are many many more factors to take into consideration), it will at least help. The SE is more likely to be able to crawl your site without any problem.

[brucec]

One way to get top ranking these days on almost all the search engines is to have link popularity. In other words, have a lot of similar sites linking to yours. The more sites who link to you, the better your search engine ranking.

Also, we use services like Submit It and we get top search engine ranking for our keywords. If your web site is an ecommerce site, Submit It is like 30 bucks per domain name per year and that is pretty cheap and they submit your site every 48 hours.

Definitely try the link popularity. Also, add your keywords to your <TITLE> tags in your HTML and also all the ALT attributes of your images. These methods can improve your rankings.

[Beach_lady]

Hi Brucec,
I have done the keywords in the title and also have made sure all the alt tags are done. I have not done the submit it but will give that a try. How often can you submit to the search engines? And should you resubmit after every change or just major ones? Like now I am adding the </p> closing tags back to my pages. Should I resubmit this now?

[BarkerJr]

You don't want to submit too often. Altavista actually bans your site if you submit too much. Once the site's in the index, you shouldn't ever have to submit it again.

I actually never submitted my current web anywhere. All the spiders that visit my web crawled down the inbound links from other webs.

[pageoneresults]

Free search engine submissions are deprecated. It is recommended that you allow the search engine spiders to find your site through links from other sites.

Google and a couple of others still offer a Free Submit form. Many of us have realized that we don't need to use these anymore.

Any other search engine submissions are going to be PFI (Pay For Inclusion) so have your CC ready. ;)

[Beach_lady]

I already did adwords, pay per click on Kanoodle and I just checked Alta Vista and they have my new page on for the search terms I used. It says refreshed 48 in past 48 hours. So now I should just wait? Yahoo is still not showing my new validated page. I guess every page connected to the site should be validated?

[Wertigon]

Relax, some search-engines take like, a month to update their vast databases. Just give it time. =)

[g1smd]

The body of your page should consist of headings, paragraphs, lists, tables, and forms.

If there was an error message relating to the placement of those basic tags then you were probably trying to nest something incorrectly.

.

<edit>I see you already confirmed that</edit>

[Beach_lady]

Hi G1smd, I finally did get every page to validate. Took forever but now they are all good to go. I'm just waiting for the big G to find me. I'm #1 - #3 for my keywords on Yahoo and MSN but still not pulling up in Goggle. I thought once I got the bugs out and the pages validated it would happen. Any idea how long you have to wait? I did go ahead and do the adwords thing so does that mean they will never take me in for a average search?