Validating Your Web Site HTML

After switching to WordPress 2.5.1 and taking on many changes to Rich Sage dot com, I also looked into the very ‘nuts and bolts’ of the code that makes up the site.  I wanted to do what I could to minimize all kinds of problems that lead to less traffic.

Site navigation is very important because of humans navigating the site.  I cannot do much about that as the direction of traffic is dictated by WordPress and the theme.  However, that is only half the traffic picture.  The site is navigated by various bots, including Google, Yahoo and MSN crawlers that catalog everything.

The problem with poor HTML on the site means that these crawlers have a hard time cateloging the content, which of course leads to fewer visitors from the search engines. After a year of online work, search engines are my best generator of traffic, with Google leading the way.

HTML Validating Service at W3C.ORG:  Just enter your URL and the script will let you know how many errors you have.

Steps I take to Validate HTML, While Writing in WordPress:

First of all I use the visual editor in WordPress Admin.  When I upgraded to the latest WordPress, I used the html editor, but that resulted in dozens of HTML errors.  Now using the WordPress VISUAL editor, my errors are down to a few -occasionally, none.

More about my HTML Validating Process…

Since you want to validate the HTML before publishing your posts, WordPress enables you to preview the post that you’ve written.  What I do is press the “PREVIEW THIS POST” button and take the resulting URL and post it in the W3C HTML validate page.

IF after you validate your temporary page and there are too many errors, you can select the HTML tab in the WordPress admin and work on correcting the mistakes.  You may have countless mistakes especially if you ‘cut and pasted’ text from another publishing program.

Now that you’ve looked into the errors and corrected as many as you could, you can proceed to publishing your post.  This pre-posting care will go a long way to helping you get the best results from all the “digital visitors” you receive.

Carpe Diem,
Rich Sage