Forum Moderators: mack
So I have 215 errors, eh? Anyone know a good means of fixing em all? I had a friend make the site for me, and he isn’t a professional, nor am I.
Is fixing these errors gonna help my google ranking? Is there a quick way to fix all of them? Are there certain errors I need to worry about and others I can ignore?
Thanks-- john
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[edited by: tedster at 7:18 pm (utc) on Feb. 11, 2005]
I took a look at the validation link you sent (chances are, it will be removed shortly, forum rules prohibit this kind of links).
Having clean, valid HTML has a lot of advantages. Not only will it help with your search engine rankings, it will also ensure that your site looks good in a wide variety of web browsers, not just IE on Windows. Throw in accessiblity and some other important things, and you have lots of compelling reasons to have valid code.
Having said that, though, this isn't an easy thing to accomplish for beginners. So, it does help to prioritize what you need to fix. First off, a lot depends on what program was used to create the HTML. From looking at the code, I suspect it wasn't hand-coded. In any event, I'd start with having a valid doctype declaration and specify the character set. Next on the list, I'd get rid of all the font tags. Have your friend check into CSS for specifying fonts. Using CSS instead of font tags is a great intro into stylesheets, should be pretty easy for a beginner. Besides, you are specifying a single font, Calisto MT, which I doubt many people can use.
At the end of the day, you want to maximize the ration of content to code on your pages. Search engines like Google love content. Well structured content with valid HTML is a lot easier for the search engine spiders to work with.
Hope this helps!
I tend to prefer to turn the question around. How many errors can you get away with in your markup before it becomes a hinderance to proper spidering? Looked that way round, it corrects the perspective. Valid pages don't boost you, it's broken pages which could drag you down.
Usually, you'll find that errors occur in cascade: in other words, you fix one, and others are fixed as a direct result because they were only errors because of the presence of the first one. Make sure you have declared a doctype at the top of the page, then declare your character encoding and work through the errors from the top. They'll fall away quicker than you'd think.
