Web Page Validation and  Accessibility

Validation

When building a website it is important to ensure that your site validates to W3C standards, the W3C stands for World Wide Web Consortium. The W3C has a free validation service.

The W3C validation service  can check your web pages to ensure they contain no HTML errors, simply cut an past the URL of the page you would like to check into their HTML validation service.

The W3C also has a link checking system to ensure there are no broken web page links on your website. The W3C also has a CSS validation service If CSS ( Cascading style sheets ) are used on a website they can be checked using this free service.

Most good web site developers make it a point to validate their code to the standards put out by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The general consensus of opinion is that doing so results in good code, faster load times, and increased website compatibility across all of the major browsers

Accessability

Accessability validation also ensures easier access to your site by visualy impared people and users of mobile phones and other mobile devices as well as those with some other disabilities. Web pages that do not conform to validation and accessibility guidelines may prevent some people with some visual disabilities from accessing you web pages, so please take time to make you web pages available to all.

These reasons alone should be very compelling reasons to make sure your website uses valid html code. Everyone benefits including the most important people,  your visitors. But does it result in major SEO benefits that affect your rankings in search engines?

Opinion is divided as for instance Google's home page contains many validation errors, so people point to this as evidence Google does not see validation as important.

However validation can only be a positive thing for your website, it can never be negative, so validate your pages today!