optimisation.com.au

The first step to optimising your site is to ensure your site's pages are correct HTML and compliant with current web standards. You would be amazed how many sites are not.

Incorrect code raises two issues. Firstly, when the search engine crawls the page it may have trouble understanding the content. Clearly this may impact on the ability to index the page. The second issue is more subtle, the search engine will identify that the HTML is incorrect and may even determine if it will be a problem viewing it in different browsers. Because search engines want to return high quality relevant links to their users the page with incorrect code will be ranked lower than a similar page with good code and content sturcture.

Web browsers are varyingly tolerant of incorrect code and problems with a site are not always evident just by viewing a page. Generally you will need to use a specific tool of which there are many. Web development tools like Dreamweaver usually have built in functions that allow you to check the validity of a page. However the best way to validate a page is at the W3C validator. W3C are the organisation that writes and maintains the standards for the web and they provide web based validation tools as a free service:

Before even considering other optimisation techniques the compliance of every page must be ensured. Check out the validation tool on this site which gives easy access to these W3C tools.