Free Website Promotion, Website Traffic, and SEO Tips

Valid HTML will help your website get indexed by the Search Engines. Valid HTML is HTML that conforms with HTML coding standards and does not contain any errors. Most Search Engines can index a site that has HTML that does not validate. Valid HTML is becoming less an less important for Search Engine indexing, but still can cause problems.

If a Search Engines seem to have a problem listing your site, you might want to make sure the HTML validates, and that there are no broken links on your site. As both non-validating HTML and sites with many broken links can potentially cause a Search Engine problems.
You can validate your HTML with one of these free tools:
http://validator.w3.org/
http://tidy.sourceforge.net/

You can check for broken links with one of these free tools:
http://validator.w3.org/checklink
http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

You probably don’t need to check for broken links more than once every few months, to ensure you don’t have too many broken links on your sites. I personally do it less often than that, but I should start doing it more often. I also don’t worry much about validating my sites. Normally I only worry about validating my site, when:

1. A Search Engine doesn’t index a large number of your pages
2. My site or blog doesn’t display correctly in a browser