Validating my website code

[Phoenix164]

I have been looking for info on making my site more SEO friendly and came accross this comment

"Make sure you validate your code. Searchbots do not like code that has lots of nasty errors."

I tried the link and got the following results page

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ht....av4home.co.uk

Can anyone tell me what they mean?

[completerookie]

a lot of your errors are cause by the use of the SPACE-BAR (simple coding errors, probably down to in-experience

example :
ERROR: 7
I think its because you have a space between the "&nbsp" and the ":"
so its looking for " " and you've got "&nbsp ;"
this is a similar problem on quite a few of your lines.
ERROR 24, again its looking for " " and you've got "& nbsp;"

look for the SPACE-BAR and so on, and most of your errors may dissapear.

Error 143 - its talking of an END tag - </table> that you've declared and you appear not to have OPENED the <table> tag somewhere.
take a look at the source code of your html, look down at the lines in the page - error 143 talks of Error Line 829 column 13: - so this is on line 829, 13th character across where the problem is:

sometimes there is sufficient clues near the line to tell you where the code is problematic - look for comments etc.

start by removing the space-bar probs, and then re-run, it won't be so daunting then

kev

[runningwolf]

Well this is an interesting thread but one I suspect has just given me a big problem.
I just tried this validate on my homepage and got 116 errors !!
the first one seems to be the DOCTYPE, I guess this should be the first thing in the code and from what I can see from here its not.
I will have to look at this tonight when I get home.
I also wondered why on my site the code goes for thousands of characters across the page where most people code is a lot tidier. WHat am I doing wrong.

I have modified all my templates in actinic from a starting point of knowing nothing about web design or html so have probably made a mess of the code and perhaps badly hurt my rankings. Now I have something to check it with I should try to get to zero errors.

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ht...doctype=Inline

Cheers
Paul
www.theorderofinitiative.co.uk

[Phoenix164]

Thanks for the reply. All of the code was generated within actinic. I havent edited any.

Do you have any ideas about the first few error messages

[pinbrook]

it would be a good idea to read other threads about validating the code that actinic generates, as you will be able to reduce the errors but you won't be able to eliminate them all together

use keyword W3C Validation

[runningwolf]

OK last question on this subject before I go break something.
I have spent the last two days looking at the code for my homepage and cant seem to find the cause of all the errors here, it seems to start with a &nbsp;
and just cascades from there I think.
I was guessing I must have an & somewhere that starts it off but I cant find anything wrong. Can someone cast a quick eye over the error 3 and hopefully give me a pointer before I lose the will to live.

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ht...pe=Inline&ss=1

I dont want anyone to spend time on it but a fresh experienced pair of eyes may spot whats eluded me these last 2 days

Cheers
Paul
www.theorderofinitiative.co.uk

[completerookie]

I wonder if the checker has become confused.
looking at line 113-119, there is a missing "#" from the "color=" attribute

when I looked at another check for your site, it told me that the system could not detect the closing </A> on line 113 onwards, so by the time it got to the </a> it started to lose track.

the link for the different validation checker was weblint
just curious if this may be the start of your problem.

the link in question givesthe errors embeded in the actual code (if you scroll down far enough) - not that I've ever user weblint before.

kev

[scolli]

Hi Paul,

According to this link, http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_font.aspthe font tag is "deprecated" in HTML 4.01, i.e not yet obsolete but only included for backward compatability.

Don't know if it makes a difference whether you have quotes around the attributes or not, i.e size="1" and color="#FFFFFF"...

I'm still working through the errors thrown up on my site by the same tool by the way!

Cheers,

[pinbrook]

Don't know if it makes a difference whether you have quotes around the attributes or not, i.e size="1" and color="#FFFFFF"...

technically you should have the quotes.

the code will still work with or without the quotes