And it would be a good idea to update your spammy signature too, which make you and your services less credible to potential customers here at WPW.

__________________
"Being an expert isn't telling other people what you know. It's understanding what questions to ask, and flexibly applying your knowledge to the specific situation at hand. Being an expert means providing sensible, highly contextual direction." Jeff Atwood
SEO Workers - Search Engine Optimization Consulting Company | SEO Analysis Tool | Webnauts Net SEO

Where is the evidence to suggest that visiting http://validator.w3.org and having a compliant site is in any way going to help your organic search rankings? Every site that is kicking my butt out there not only fails validation but with 100's of errors. Where is the evidence that customer's care? One of my competitors is closing in on 43 million dollars this year - somehow I don't think he cares if his site looks the same on all browsers. In fact there is some evidence to suggest that sites that pass validation don't perform as well on Google but do better on MSN. And I don't think customer's care if your borders on IE are blue but on Mozilla are grey. As long as they don't have to scroll too much and as long as the page loads reasonably fast - customers could care less about valid HTML.

I have a site that doesn't validate and I have over 450 pages. I am not too unhappy with how my site appears across different browsers and so before I spend 100's of hours in an area that in the end may have little impact - I was wondering if you could point me to specific case studies where valid html was worth the effort and led to a higher ranking and an increase in the conversion from visitor to sale.

Thanks

SLBushway,

You might want to read these two discussions and add your observations and question to either of them;

http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic...982&highlight=

http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic...189&highlight=

__________________
Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work. Aristotle (384-322 BC)

Quote:

Matt Cutts recently confirmed that there is nothing in their algorithms that favors validated code:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...51959310&hl=en

However, almost any business depends on repeat customers. Your site traffic should show more return visitors than new SE generated traffic in a short period if it is worth anything to anyone at all.

That's much harder to accomplish with sloppy code!

Ken

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Mountain Eagle Marketing
Contemporary Art News
Modern Art News

Hi Tim and all,

I have submitted my site before reading about the 20 posts prerequisite ( sorry )- may i suggest this is why there appear to be so many banal comments like " good site" or "looks good" which you commmeted on negatively. Basically as a newbie to make 20 posts i either need to ask 20 questions or post something equally banal - I am in no position to help anyone with any substantial comments or responses. There may be a bit of cause and effect going on here.

I built my site with NVU which is not bad to use although finding help for specific questions is a bit difficult . There is an NVU forum but it doesn't seem to be very well frequented.

susan

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I've come a long way in the journey of life and most of the roads weren't paved.

Very usefull information, I spent almost 1/2 a day to go through all the URLs above. Check and modify and repeat... Woh! great job.

I went through the tools suggested and faired pretty well except @ W3c. My problem is I began this site using a template from my host who used a prgm called "Web Builder" It had some serious flaws that were very frustrating, so I started doing my revisions by hand, keeping the template.

The majority of errors detected by W3c have to do with DOCTYPE and whether "attributes" are used properly IN THE TEMPLATE not the content. Looks like the template is proprietary so I don't see how I can ever pass W3c without starting from scratch...not a pleasant thought cause I've received quite a few compliments from my customers about the site.

What to do...what to do?

Hi PapaJim,

What's the URL?

By the way, the second site in your signature is unavailable.

__________________
Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work. Aristotle (384-322 BC)

Hi, Tim,

Thanks for your interest. The URL I am trying to improve on is the first one below: http://itllbefun.com.

Regarding the second site, I just signed up with this program yesterday and stepped into some issues with their server. Seems they had some glitches show up in the software this weekend and they seem to be growing :(

Hope it's solved soon because the products are near to my heart and drive (see profile).

Again, thanks

Some of the links to the tools at the start of this thread are great, but the w3 validation tool seems totally pointless to me.

My site came up with 69 errors, so I checked Google.com and it had a similar amount and this site has it's fair share- http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ht...ebproworld.com

Personally I think that the W3 validator is a complete waste of time, if your website works ok in most browsers than who cares if W3 find petty little faults with it?

The sitereport card is a very useful tool and is saved to favorites.

Many people make spelling mistakes, so does that make dictionaries totally pointless too? As has been discussed at length (eg. here and here) errors can have a considerable detrimental effect. Even a simple (petty) error can cause blind people and search engines to miss content even if it renders in the regular browsers. There is, of course no compulsion to follow the recommendations (or spell correctly) but generally it's good practice and if you do happen across a browser oddity it's going to be a lot easier to discover the cause with clean code.

__________________
Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work. Aristotle (384-322 BC)

MY website is
Mod Edit - CTABUK - Please don't spam us, reply on topic next time - thanks

I have tried this all before, but ended up having a large headache! One test said I had a broken link, and when I checked it it was fine. It said I had 18 spelling mistakes, like "didnt" and my name. But didnt was spelt with a ' and how is my name spelt wrong?? Another useless piece of software!

I have tried before to clean up my html, but was a waste of time, because no matter what I did, I always had problems. My site ranks in the top ten on the majors and the site can be read by most.

I want a site that makes money and don't care if this organization or that organization agree with my code. If Google, Yahoo and MSN like it, then that's just fine by me. I have seen sites that have many errors in it, some reeally bad ones, yet they are in the top 10, which suggests that the Top 3 SE don't care either. Google's own sites have tons of errors!

Give me a break!!

Xen2 no one cares if you like to build crappy sites, as with invalid code and/or broken links.

But just FYI, Google for sure would care if you have broken links. And can Search Engines can have difficulties spidering your pages which have invalid code.

I hope this will cure your headache. ;)

__________________
"Being an expert isn't telling other people what you know. It's understanding what questions to ask, and flexibly applying your knowledge to the specific situation at hand. Being an expert means providing sensible, highly contextual direction." Jeff Atwood
SEO Workers - Search Engine Optimization Consulting Company | SEO Analysis Tool | Webnauts Net SEO

Thank you for your considered response. My sites all do well and are indexed within a week and have healthy Page Ranks. If you think my sites are crappy, then that's fine, my bank account says different!

Oh, by the way, you have a broken link on your http://www.webnauts.net/ site!!

Xen2 I did not mean that your sites are crappy. I just said if you like to build such sites it is fine with me.

And maybe you are ranking well now, lets see how it looks like next year.

And how do you rank here by the way? http://labs.google.com/accessible/

And thanks for the broken link hint. I will check that right now.

__________________
"Being an expert isn't telling other people what you know. It's understanding what questions to ask, and flexibly applying your knowledge to the specific situation at hand. Being an expert means providing sensible, highly contextual direction." Jeff Atwood
SEO Workers - Search Engine Optimization Consulting Company | SEO Analysis Tool | Webnauts Net SEO

Xen2 I just run XENU and I have not found any broken links. Can you tell where it is?

__________________
"Being an expert isn't telling other people what you know. It's understanding what questions to ask, and flexibly applying your knowledge to the specific situation at hand. Being an expert means providing sensible, highly contextual direction." Jeff Atwood
SEO Workers - Search Engine Optimization Consulting Company | SEO Analysis Tool | Webnauts Net SEO

This is the result I got:

Processing http://www.webnauts.net/

This may take some time... (why?)
Anchors

Found 16 anchors.

Valid anchors!
List of broken links and redirects

Fragments listed are broken. See the table below to know what action to take.
Code Occurrences What to do
(N/A) 9 The link was not checked due to robots exclusion rules. Check the link manually, and see also the link checker documentation on robots exclusion.
404 1 The link is broken. Fix it NOW!

http://ekstreme.com/socializer/?url=...ulting+Company
What to do: The link is broken. Fix it NOW!
Response status code: 404
Response message: Not Found
Line: 197

Xen

Most of my sites have been up for two years and my PR and visitors have only increased.

My rank is just fine at http://labs.google.com/accessible/.

Everyone runs around trying to please Google & Co. But as far as I am concerned, the amount of visitors I am getting is far more important. And there is other ways of getting traffic than the major SE's. If we focus more on getting traffic to our sites than trying to please and pander to the always unsatisfied and ever changing SE's, our internet experience would be much easier and more profitable.

Google is a popularity contest and I was never popular at school.

Maybe if I knew "how" to correct my erroneous code, then maybe I would. If there was a program that could correct your erroneous code, I definitely would!!

Xen

Hey Xen, I think our paths met somewhere. Cool stuff man. I agree with your point of making profit also without SE. And it is true that Google is a popularity contest. LOL

About cleaning up your code, I can suggest you an excellent free desktop tool: http://www.htmlvalidator.com/lite/ and if you ask for a site review here, PM me the link and I will do my very best to help you out. Promise. ;)

So lets go for it buddy. :)

__________________
"Being an expert isn't telling other people what you know. It's understanding what questions to ask, and flexibly applying your knowledge to the specific situation at hand. Being an expert means providing sensible, highly contextual direction." Jeff Atwood
SEO Workers - Search Engine Optimization Consulting Company | SEO Analysis Tool | Webnauts Net SEO

Webnauts said...

About cleaning up your code, I can suggest you an excellent free desktop tool: http://www.htmlvalidator.com/lite/ and if you ask for a site review here, PM me the link and I will do my very best to help you out. Promise. ;)


Hi Webnauts,

I tried the htmlvalidator and didn't like it because the free edition is limited and doesn't show all the errors.

However, I found something totally better. It is Total Validator, which is a Firefox plugin. This is a nice piece of work, but you need to be using a Firefox browser(and who isn't??).

I hope that we can work together and be friends.

Warm regards,

Xen

Sure we can be friends man. And I just posted in your site review thread. And Total Validator is great. I have him too.

__________________
"Being an expert isn't telling other people what you know. It's understanding what questions to ask, and flexibly applying your knowledge to the specific situation at hand. Being an expert means providing sensible, highly contextual direction." Jeff Atwood
SEO Workers - Search Engine Optimization Consulting Company | SEO Analysis Tool | Webnauts Net SEO

Hi All,

A while ago I found a online SEO tool that ranked websites with a score of 0-100.

I have poked around the forum here, and of course, googled "seo optimize" and others but have not found the site.

It was quite a good tool because I ended up ranking well. Anyideas. The key was the score of 0-100 and free.

Thanks
Bill
www.advisemyparents.com

It sounds like sitening.com

Exactly Xen: http://www.sitening.com/tools/seo-analyzer/

__________________
"Being an expert isn't telling other people what you know. It's understanding what questions to ask, and flexibly applying your knowledge to the specific situation at hand. Being an expert means providing sensible, highly contextual direction." Jeff Atwood
SEO Workers - Search Engine Optimization Consulting Company | SEO Analysis Tool | Webnauts Net SEO

I clicked and used the tools that Tim speaks of, but I am a newbie and have never done this before. The first tool worked fine but I don't understand the HTML code errors and it also said that my load time was slow and I don't understand how to fix or change that either.

When I used the Watchfire link it said that it didn't finish within the allowed amount of time. Does that mean that I have other problems with load times also? How do I fix these this?

Any help you can give me will be appreciated.

http://www.cookwareandappliance.com

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www.cookwareandappliance.com
Free recipes and cooking tips, along with the pots & pans to cook with.

Hi Susan,

Your homepage alone contains 93 errors according to the W3C Validation check. The load time is very slow because your images have large file sizes, you need to compress the jpegs with a web-savvy graphics program. Although some of your images appear to be small in dimension, in actual fact they are much bigger. Using Firefox or Opera, right click them and select 'View' or 'Open Image' to see their actual dimensions.

I suggest you submit your site for review by the wider audience. You will doubtless get a cascade of helpful advice about how to fix the errors.

Kind regards,

Tim

__________________
Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work. Aristotle (384-322 BC)

Thank you for the advice and I will submit for review and help. I will also look into compressing the size of the images.

__________________
www.cookwareandappliance.com
Free recipes and cooking tips, along with the pots & pans to cook with.

SusanL post here the link to site review so we can have a look.

__________________
"Being an expert isn't telling other people what you know. It's understanding what questions to ask, and flexibly applying your knowledge to the specific situation at hand. Being an expert means providing sensible, highly contextual direction." Jeff Atwood
SEO Workers - Search Engine Optimization Consulting Company | SEO Analysis Tool | Webnauts Net SEO

Here is my site for review.

www.cookwareandappliance.com

I will appreciate any help any one can give me. I may not know how to do some of the things you tell me about and will ask for more help. Remember this is my first time owning or working with a website.

__________________
www.cookwareandappliance.com
Free recipes and cooking tips, along with the pots & pans to cook with.

Susan I think you have misunderstood me. You should start a new own thread in the site review forums.

__________________
"Being an expert isn't telling other people what you know. It's understanding what questions to ask, and flexibly applying your knowledge to the specific situation at hand. Being an expert means providing sensible, highly contextual direction." Jeff Atwood
SEO Workers - Search Engine Optimization Consulting Company | SEO Analysis Tool | Webnauts Net SEO

Thank you, I guess I just wasn't thinking when I did that.

__________________
www.cookwareandappliance.com
Free recipes and cooking tips, along with the pots & pans to cook with.

thank you for the information Tim, I did make some changes but I don't think, I'll ever get the perfect score!!!!

Hi there,

I did some tests and changed my site, and when doing the W3 test it said my site needs a DOCU TYPE heading for each of the pages.

They recommended this one -

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en">

And when I tested my site using this, it comes back with even more errors saying IMG tag empty or not closed, etc. Why is this?

Thanks for any help. Matt

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Earn money whilst online at Paid2Review | Earn £3K minimum at LayMyBet

Hello Matt,

Firstly, I doubt if W3C 'recommended' an XHTML Strict Doctype, more likely just an example of what you could use.

Assuming that the site your talking about is the first in your sig., it is not XHTML of any kind...more like HTML 4.01 Transitional, in which case your homepage only has 26 errors instead of 140. In XHTML, all tags end with />, hence the image tag error.

Replace the Doctype with;

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

and then follow the 'How to fix' guides to the errors including replacing '&' with &amp; in the hyperlinks.

I hope that helps,

Tim

__________________
Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work. Aristotle (384-322 BC)

Hi Tim,

Thanks so much for your help, I will change my code and have another go.

Is XHTML much different to HTML then?

Thanks again. Matt

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Earn money whilst online at Paid2Review | Earn £3K minimum at LayMyBet

Matt,

XHTML is a development of HTML, incorporating XML, essentially simplifying and 'correcting' the latter.

Read the W3C Schools' explanation

Follow the W3C Schools' tutorial

Glad to be of help,

Tim

__________________
Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work. Aristotle (384-322 BC)

This is a great for SEO, great post

__________________
TopHatSolutions
Web Design Wexford
Web Design Ireland

Sounds like I have the same opinion about W3C Validator. I ran it against my home page several weeks ago...fixed several errors...and gave up.

Errors such as:

there is no attribute "width".
<body width="1024" background="../img/blacksquare.gif">

and

there is no attribute "height".
...bgcolor="#333333" width="896" height="75">

boggle my mind. I also have a few:

document type does not allow element "td" here; assuming missing "tr" start-tag.

I assume I used one before or after another illegally. Yet, I don't see any visual difference in my pages.

Did I select the correct doc type "XHTML 1.0 Transitional"? It appears it produced the least amount of errors...yet, it produced a few illogical errors (in my mind, anyway).

Don't get me wrong; this tool appears to catch a lot of coding errors...but some of the errors are incomprehensible.

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getmea,

If you use Firefox I recommend this HTML validator extension :

http://users.skynet.be/mgueury/mozilla/

This will help identify any markup errors and gives advise on how to correct them. It can also 'Tidy' the code for you.

__________________
Changing Constants Ltd - 'the only thing constant is change' - affordable e-commerce website design

I have just come across this forum. Great suggestion regarding checking your website. I checked it out and was releived to see that my site's homepage appears to be OK...as for the other pages, well I'll have to check those too!

We didn't know you've existed until you came to this forum :-)

My website
Discounts , Coupons and Rebates on online purchases at www.Saving4All.com
Any tip will be valuable.

I think this forum has many experts who have valuable tips on designing websites .
Experts:Can you give me some tips on how to improve my site.


Thanks in Advance

I have a question. When I run the link check software, it says I have 100 dead links on my front page!!! This makes no sense to me, since I can click on every link and it works, and Google Webmaster says I have no dead links, anyone have any ideas? For example, it looks like it is saying every image (which you can click on) is a dead link? I get the same high number of dead links when I run validate links in my firefox toolbar, so I am thinking something is wrong.

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http://www.cell-stuff.net

your post helped me a lot. i realize that i need more improvement in my blog.

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check our featured Malaysia Property

a good seo tool

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where is a will ,there is a way to earn my first bucket of gold.

Thanks, Tim. I found one that I had not used before. Here's another that may be useful to some.

Protection from Adware, Spam, Viruses, Online Scams | McAfee SiteAdvisor

Also,

Google Webmaster Central

Almost embarrassed to ask, very new here, but...my brother has a website, in asp code. He bought it online; it's an e-commerce site and pretty generic. It did very poorly on these tests, and he can only work through the CMS it has. I was reading that the problem with not ranking in Google is the asp programming; is that true? It can't be 'tweaked' because he doesn't have access to any control panel. He gets almost 10,000 visitors/month and the domain is 4 years old. But zero links from Google.
I know there are a lot of variables, but these tests showed hundreds of errors. If anyone has a suggestion - I told him he might want to change hosts, but he is staying with this 'e-merchant' solution.

ow can he get 10,000 per month and 0 from Google ?

That's nothing short of amazing I must say.