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SEO Weekend #2 – Easy

Our weekly series continues with our next installment of SEO Weekend. The feedback from week 1 was extremely positive and I am motivated to keep the ball moving. Are you ready!

This weeks exercise is an easy task but the results may be more complicated and perhaps even shocking. One of the most fundamental aspects of SEO is called on-page SEO. On-page SEO is the programming aspect of SEO which includes HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Off-page SEO is how we influence other websites to help improve our own websites SEO. For example, the creation of an inbound link to your website from an outside source is considered an off-page SEO technique.

Valid HTML and CSS are the foundation of on-page SEO. An organization called W3C (World Wide Consortium) has created a set of standards that all web pages should follow. W3C's mission statement is “To lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web.”

Task #1 – Validate your homepage.

Enter your homepage URL and hit the check button.

Don’t cringe if you are seeing and abundance of errors. Most are not critical and may not be affecting your SEO. The problem comes into play when your site cannot be crawled by the search engines. To simplify, the search engine have programs that read your site and provide the data for your site to be indexed in search results pages. If your site is poorly coded than it may not be able to complete their task. In addition to potential issues with (those search engine programs called) spiders and crawlers poorly coded pages can also result in a different client experience in one browser to browser (called cross-browser compatibility).

I ran my test today and yielded 11 errors that cropped up along the way. I will be busy tonight!! These errors tend to come up as you develop your site but should be caught in a regular maintenance program.

validation

Tell us your result and let’s discuss a few issues that are out there.

Related Post: SEO Weekend #1 – Easy

Posted by IMNJ - Internet Marketing Specialist on 06/27/2008 03:06 PM

Comments (25)

seo weekend, w3c, onpage seo

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25 Comments on SEO Weekend #2 – Easy

JUN

2008

Well Howard,

Not so good.

My site had 95 Validation errors, and 3 yellow cautions.

Are these all html errors, that need to be corrected in the content pages HTML view. Maybe some of them are at the developer access level??

I generally fun Google Webmaster, of course without really knowing what I am looking at. I usually get good results with no or few errors.

I did notice today that the Webmaster had added sitemap priority as factor. I contacted the site company and they were made aware of this new development on 6/24.

Now, these two subjects may not even be related.

On the validation, should I go through the hmtl on my content pages and see if I can find the errors? Or do you think the time spent will be worth it for SEO or for user benefit>

Richard

JUN

2008

Okay guys! I have topped Richard with 105 errors, and at least 20 yellow cautions that begin with the words "cannot generate system identifier for general entity". I did notice that I had a lot of HTML errors, as well. Unforunately, I am not as good as Richard seems to be and I have no idea what the heck to do or if I need to do anything! Help!

We have 323 errors on one site and 105 on another. I don't know what any of it means. It looks like I have a lot of research to do.

Checking back for a response from Howard, and I see your two posts.

I had to chuckle.

Man, there is a lot of stuff to this internet stuff.

I used to be a mortgage originator and had to know how to calculate DTI and LTV.

Richard

All - I will have my full reply tonight. Thanks for participating.

I missed you first installment, I will have to find....thnaks for the info.

All of my errors were from third party provided code:

Valid Code

Richard - I reviewed your code.

You need to declare your doctype:

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

I suggest transitional and it can be the first line of code.

Additionally remove all of the "/" from the end of a html code with short tag errors. 
That should bring you down to a managable number of errors.

I also saw a number of missing alt and title tags which are also easy fixes.

Jen -

You are not in as bad as shape as you think you have mostly short tag errors and missing alt and title tags which is easily correctable.

Leslie - Your site has some of the more serious errors of the several I have reviewed. There is a chance that some of these errors may cause issues for the spiders to completely read your site.

There are a number of issues with files names and javascript declarations that should be able to resolved. You also have a number of short tag errors and missing alt and title tags.

You would also be able to resolve a number of errors by changing the "&" to "&" on lines with identified issues.

Call me if you wanted to discuss anything specific.

JUN

2008

HOward- I will check with our software people and let them know the diagnosis. I think they will most likely be able to fix the problems, now that thanks to you, I know that there is a problem, and what it most likely is! Thank you again for inviting me to this group!! I feel like I am getting a real education!!

Richard- I am sure that this will be the first of many times that I will make you chuckle as I trek my way through this process of website/internet marketing! :) I am amazed that you were able to know what you were looking for on the errors that came up! Thanks to Howard, though, I am confident that between his input, and all the others that participate in AR, that I will get a little more savvy!

Jen - my pleasure to help out.

Hi INMJ, I've topped everyone with a whopping 327 errors & a failed validation!!! What the heck?!?!

Of course I don't know what it means, but I'm hoping that you can give me some insight!

Thanks so much,

JUN

2008

Yvette - I did not see anything that I would consider a major issue. Most of the problems stem from a lack of proper CSS. Your website is full of in-line styles which are not optimum and should be in a CSS file. I apologize if this is a built technical but style attributes should be in a separate CSS file and outside of HTML. This not only condenses the HTML on a page thereby making it faster to load but is also the proper way to create a webpage and websites.

I would not worry about it too much but would discuss it with your webmaster to resolve.

JUL

2008

I validated my home page with over 300 errors. Many of the error messages were for the same issue, but even so I was humbled. Now I have about 80 pages to run through the validator. If this was easy I hate to see the week-end assignment that is labeled hard.

It took most of Saturday to weed my way down to just 5 errors. The validator is picking on 5 of my <hr /> I'm sure that the issue is something in the lines above the first error but I can't see it. Looks like I'll have to start commenting out html untilI figure it out.

Thanks for making these assignments, it's like having a personal trainer. Assignment 1 got me to upgrade firefox from 1 beta (which I didn't care for). Now maybe I can stop using IE.

It's like a gold star... 300 errors later I got my prize!

This Page Is Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict!

Way to go Bob - we will resume SEO Weekend next weekend. Glad it helps.

thanks. I've forgotten to check this lately, and I found 23 mistakes. Guess I better get busy too...

I had 89 errors. They didn't seem to be major. It did say it was unable to validate. I had a lot of missing attributes. I use Windows Office Live to host my website.

This page is not Valid HTML 4.0 Transitional!

<form enctype="application/x-www-form-urlencoded" action="check" method="get" id="form" accept-charset="UNKNOWN"> Result: Address: Encoding: Doctype: Root Element:

Failed validation, 443 Errors

utf-8 (detect automatically) utf-8 (Unicode, worldwide) utf-16 (Unicode, worldwide) iso-8859-1 (Western Europe) iso-8859-2 (Central Europe) iso-8859-3 (Southern Europe) iso-8859-4 (North European) iso-8859-5 (Cyrillic) iso-8859-6-i (Arabic) iso-8859-7 (Greek) iso-8859-8 (Hebrew, visual) iso-8859-8-i (Hebrew, logical) iso-8859-9 (Turkish) iso-8859-10 (Latin 6) iso-8859-11 (Latin/Thai) iso-8859-13 (Latin 7, Baltic Rim) iso-8859-14 (Latin 8, Celtic) iso-8859-15 (Latin 9) iso-8859-16 (Latin 10) us-ascii (basic English) euc-jp (Japanese, Unix) shift_jis (Japanese, Win/Mac) iso-2022-jp (Japanese, email) euc-kr (Korean) gb2312 (Chinese, simplified) gb18030 (Chinese, simplified) big5 (Chinese, traditional) Big5-HKSCS (Chinese, Hong Kong) tis-620 (Thai) koi8-r (Russian) koi8-u (Ukrainian) iso-ir-111 (Cyrillic KOI-8) macintosh (MacRoman) windows-1250 (Central Europe) windows-1251 (Cyrillic) windows-1252 (Western Europe) windows-1253 (Greek) windows-1254 (Turkish) windows-1255 (Hebrew) windows-1256 (Arabic) windows-1257 (Baltic Rim)

HTML 4.0 Transitional (detect automatically) XHTML 1.0 Strict XHTML 1.0 Transitional XHTML 1.0 Frameset HTML 4.01 Strict HTML 4.01 Transitional HTML 4.01 Frameset HTML 3.2 HTML 2.0 ISO/IEC 15445:2000 ("ISO HTML") XHTML 1.1 XHTML Basic 1.0 XHTML-Print 1.0 XHTML 1.1 plus MathML 2.0 XHTML 1.1 plus MathML 2.0 plus SVG 1.1 MathML 2.0 SVG 1.0 SVG 1.1 SVG 1.1 Tiny SVG 1.1 Basic SMIL 1.0 SMIL 2.0

HTML

Validation Output: 443 Errors

uh.... ok??!!?

</form>

Well, not as many as some but have no idea what it means...280...BAM

Thanks for the site - only 2 errors thus far.

JUL

2008

IMNJ- Great Post! I just ran the Validator and first I got 32 errorss, Then, I deleted the meebo widget and it dropped to 21! I had the widget in the template, and it was saving across my whole website. I'm redoing the site from scratch since I changed firms.

JUL

2008

okay....so I checked...it said failed validation...19 errors and very boldly stated

"This page is not Valid (no Doctype found)!"

I scrolled down to find myself reading a foreign language...

3 potential issues:

Unable to Determine Parse Mode!

No DOCTYPE found! Attempting validation with HTML 4.01 Transitional.

Character Encoding mismatch!

So what is the next step, or rather, would you like to be my translator? Thanks so much for your time!

Molly LeBlanc (Pete Anderson Realty)

2:29am • #24

JAN

You asked for it... I had 11 errors and 3 warnings! My site is a template from Z57. It appears the incoming data from Realty Times may be an issue. What should I do? ~Pat

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