Why HTML/XHTML Verification is Required?


There are various reasons to verify your website before hosting it over the internet.
· Any webpage quality depends on how well you have written your webpage. It
should be syntactically correct and should pass all the Quality Gates.
· When any search engine does indexing for your webpage content, it might get
confused if the HTML tags are not written properly, and much of the webpage
content might not be indexed properly.
· There might be many HTML tags, which you are using in your webpage but then
have been depreciated and many of the search engines do not support them.
· Consistency, HTML Code Beauty, Process Compliance are always appreciated by
good webmasters.
What is W3C Compliance?
W3C is the World Wide Web Consortium and since 1994, the W3C has provided the
guidelines by which websites and webpages should be structured and created. Here are
the links to validate your web pages:
· Validate HTML/XHTML File against W3C Standard HTML/XHTML Validator.
· Validate CSS File against W3C Standard CSS Validator.
While verification, you may get errors along with appropriate reasons. All the validations
will be done using XHTML DTD, which is a refined version of HTML.
Rules for W3C Compliance
The following rules are to be following while developing a webpage:
· Use XHTML declaration statements to start every XHTML page:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC
"-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
· Every tag must be closed.
· The head and body tags are now mandatory.
· Empty tags get a terminating slash. An empty tag is a tag that doesn't require an
end tag. Examples include <br> and <hr>.
11. SEO ─ Verifying a Website
SEO
18
<BR> is now <br />.
<HR> is now <hr />.
<IMG SRC="--"> is now <img src="--" />
· All tags must be lower-case. This does not apply to attributes, only tags. For
example, both of these formats are acceptable under the XHTML DTD:
<FONT color="#ffffcc"> is invalid
<font color="#ffffcc"> is valid
<font color="#FFFFCC"> is also valid
· All the attribute values should be put within double quotes.
· Tags may not be nested.
<b><i>Text</b></i> This is invalid
<b><i>Text</i></b> This is valid
· The <pre> tag should not contain: img, object, big, small, sub, or sup.
· One <form> tag cannot be inside another <form> tag.
· If your code contains a &, it must be written as &amp;.
· Any use of CSS should use all lower-case letters.
SEO
19
Creating, editing, and promoting unique high-quality content is difficult and time
consuming. If you are really serious about SEO and you are not getting expected results,
then it would be better to hire an SEO expert.
SEO experts perform the following tasks:
· Code validation and clean up - Ensure that the code is search engine friendly and
standards compliant.
· Site Structure - Building a semantic structure/theme and ensure URLs are spider
friendly.
· On-Page optimization - Page Title, copywriting, call-to-action, etc.
· Quality link building - Securing one way links from relevant sites.
· Keyword research - Building a list of key phrases relevant to your business.
· Creating Quality Content - Building optimized pages around terms discovered
through keyword research.
· Off-Page Optimization – Managing Blogs, Press Releases, Article Submissions.
If you are confident that you have the required skills, then you can take care of all the
above activities; otherwise it is worth taking help from SEO Companies or to hire an SEO
specialist.

Comments