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By now, you have built your website, the content is great, your site is all brand new and ready to go. Now we need to know if you have gone to the effort of Validating all your pages in your website. If your next question is What do you mean Validate my pages? then hopefully we can help.
Unfortunately most web pages on the Internet have not been validated and it may be harming them. By valid, we mean that you have been to w3 validation site and checked your pages. Once you have finished building each page go and validate it to ensure that you do not have any errors. Of course, if you use the Firefox browser, you can install a plugin to do validation for you.
I can already hear you asking why bother - as we already know that most people don't. This is of course a good question which we will try and explain.
As we have already mentioned, the SE Spiders act like a web browser - they visit your page and "read" the HTML file that makes up your page. We would assume that the Spider is programmed to follow the W3C Web standards and guidelines. If the spider follows the W3C guidelines, then making sure that your webpage is compliant and validates ensures that when the spider comes to visit that it will not have problems.
Validating your page also has other benefits. By taking the trouble to validate your website you are showing your web visitors that you care. It is easy to make mistakes when you are creating your web page and some mistakes do not show up in all web browsers in the same way.
Strictly speaking, you don't need to bother with validation, but are you prepared to risk your site not being crawled by a SE spider because you made a tiny mistake? Well, we certainly are not willing to take that risk, so we always validate our pages (with the Firefox plugin).
If you have read all of our introductory articles, you would have seen how we started with a plan, kept SEO as a factor in building a website and paying attention to details, you would now have a website that is ready for the next step - Promotion.
Most SEO steps are really all about common sense and making sure that your website follows the recommended standards and does not have errors. Your website will now be ready for the site visitors and the Search engines to index.