New to SEO.How important is HTML Validation

Does html validation play a big role in ranking

[Dstyles]

Hi Everyone

I'm new to SEO (just starting)and I am going to start a new website and want to know how important HTML Validation is to search engine rankings? WIll my rankings improve if I Validate the code?and considering CSS doesn't function the same across the board(Netscape / I.E.) is it worth it or should I just concentrate on content,keywords etc.?

Thanks,
Styles

[annej]

I'll be interested to see what people say about this. My HTML is hand done over several years and suspect it wouldn't validate well. I seem to do fine in Google searches though so I'm guessing that at least Google isn't looking at how sloppy my HTML is but I may be wrong.

As far as CSS is concerned it can only help. For example you can have your H1 headings without having big ugly gigantic text. If you have a navigation column on the left with CSS you can put it at the bottom of the HTML page so the search engine will see the real content of the page first. Drop by the CSS forum and see what you think.

[jaski]

Hi Dstyles,
Welcome to the webmasterworld.

I think there was a thread recently on this...can't find it right now .. may be some one else can point you to that.

As far as I remember, the general consensus was that it does not have direct impact on rankings as of now .. but it may well become important in future ..

[mack]

I dont honestly think validation is very importaint (from an seo point of view) yet. A lot of my old pages that come no where close to validation still rank fairly well on Google.

I can see there coming a time where the top se's will require at least a minimum level of validation before they will index pages. But i think this is some time off.

Mack.

[tedster]

There are several ways to fail validation - and only some of them might hurt you on today's search engines. Using deprecated tags will not hurt you. Using proprietary HTML will not hurt you.

But if your code is not well formed, if you are missing closing tags for elements for instance, or have badly messed up tag nesting, or you have nasty typos in your HTML -- then there could be entire parts of a page that are being missed.

Basic validation of your code is an important part of good SEO. Purist validation (with a shiny W3C sticker) is part of moving the web into the future, but it's not essential for the search engines.

[Dstyles]

Thanks for the input and advice.I plan on using a template to create my site any advice on sourcs for templates with good/proper code?

Thanks