I’ve seen numerous posts where people have claimed that good clean HTML leads to better SEO rankings. I’ve even talked about the lie that of the link between SEO and valid HTML.

I’ve yet to see any studies done which verify this claim and in fact I’ve even seen evidence to the opposite effect being true. I pointed out how in some competitive markets, the higher the ranking for the site the worse the validation recently in another post. This does not mean that poor code relates to higher rankings – just that valid HTML code doesn’t correlate to better rankings as some people would like to say, just like good clean code doesn’t mean the site will look better to visitors.

Matt Cutts recently did a short video on why Google’s own code doesn’t validate. (video opens new window – not allowed to embed)

Now does this mean that you should only have your web designers write invalid code – not, but it does mean you shouldn’t waste unnecessary time on it either.

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• Google Says Pages That Validate Do Not Get Ranking Boost (seroundtable.com)

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The government will be starting back the ARC loans (more info) which will given struggling businesses up to $35,000 to borrow interest free.

ARC loans are supposed to help the small businesses which are stuggling due to the economy and thus the fact that there are fewer customers, and the customers are buying less.  ARC loans are to help bridge that gap in income, and help you remain solvent while looking for new opportunities.

Many businesses are turning to the Internet to find new customers, but they are sure how.  Evidence of that is the fact that 90% of small and medium businesses quit using pay-per-click and related on-line ads after only 6 months. If you want to use your ARC funds to help you expand your business, you need to work with someone who specializes in small businesses.

This is because many business owners, while excellent at what they do, do not know how to properly set up and run their website, and many web designers, don’t know how to help clients once the website is launched.  I work exclusively with small businesses to help them be successful, often staying with them months after the launch to make sure the website is doing what it needs to do to help them be successful in getting new customers.

Likewise, some companies try to work with anyone, small, medium, and large, and they treat them all the same.  I only work with small businesses and I am a small business, so I understand the need to be quick to change, cost effective, and how to create that personal experience on-line.

If you need, I can help your business make more money on-line through my experince in Search Engine Optimization, website optimization (both speed and customer experience), pay-per-click campaigns, and more.  Contact me if you need help.

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There are lots of interesting theories out there about how one can get there site to rank better in search engines. Unfortunately much of this advice, while it would make since, is wrong.

One example is that correct, valid HTML code is important for search engines to read your website, and thus for you rank highly.

This makes sense for several reasons:

• bad code may not be read by a search engine as it doesn’t know what it sees,
• search engines want to promote good code, to clean the web of garbage, or even
• bad coding appears unprofessional, and therefore is likely to be web spam/fraudulent/etc.

Unfortunately, there is little evidence that any of these statements are true.

First, lets consider that it is estimated that over 99% of the web is made up on invalid HTML code [source]. If this is the case, could you imagine being the search engine which cannot read those pages, or which pages you would be able to read. A search engine which only searched valid HTML pages would find so little, that no one would really use it.

Search engines, while many do claim they want to promote good clean HTML pages, also realize search engines need to promote finding appropriate information on the web. While a web designed might find valid HTML important, the common user is more interested in finding out about the new digital camera, how to download a ring tone to his phone, or other related information.

Of course the proof is in the pudding, as they say. So I took several random search queries.  If the given hypothesis is true, then the top search engine rankings will have clean, or nearly clean code.

The first item I searched for was “shoes”. The top three results, in order was:

• Shoes.Com – has 253 errors and 124 warnings on there homepage [source]
• Zappos.com – has 144 errors and 101 warnings [source]
• payless.com/store/ – has 81 errors and 22 warnings [source]

I also checked two other popular search terms “travel”, (expedia.com with 154 Errors and 194 warnings [source]) and doctor (webmd.com/physician_finder/ with 101 Errors and 32 warnings [source]).

Given that these are popular search terms, one would think that search engines code find plenty of valid HTML webpages. However, it decides to rank these.  And as you can see with the shoes examples, the further down in the search results you went, the “better” the web page.  So, based upon this basic information, I would have to say that any boost a search engine gives you based upon valid HTML code is limited or more likely imaginary.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…

Does this mean we shouldn’t develop valid HTML websites? NO!

Instead, look at developing content which a search engine wants to see. I assume that if my browsers can read it, the major search engines can read it. We should develop new code to be valid, but not worry about fixing old code if it is working. There are clearly other things that we can do to make our sites more search engine friendly.

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SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a way for your company to get new visitors by using search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN Live Search. Some people will say that they don’t like to spend money on SEO, because who knows how much money they are spending, and can they get any return on their investment (ROI) for their optimization. Some people even wonder if SEO works at all, saying it is nothing more than 21st century snake oil.

Well I’ve never thought so. When I set up an SEO campaign, one of the things I do, is also set up some form of  website tracking. I want to be able to show the change in website traffic. I will use other tools to show where a site ranks for given keywords, and how many times those key words and phrases are used to find the site.

I send this information to clients because I want to show them what I do, and how it affects their websites, and business. Sometimes, as sites slowly start to rank better over the course of several months, the changes might mean that they don’t recognize the change.

client saves $25000 per year by optimizing his site for Google

All this is good, but when going through several tools I use, I found something more interesting for a customer.  I found a tool on-line which estimates what they save each month by ranking organically (coming up in the regular search listing) compared to if they had to buy those visitors using a pay-per-click type of advertising. See a small sample of this report on the right.

Turns out he is saving approximately $2100 per month, over $25000 per year, with how he ranked organically in Google alone. (This doesn’t include savings to be found with other web search tools, such as Yahoo, MSN Live Search, etc.) Now this was a report he could understand.

This customer is a small company, in a niche market, and so they don’t get a lot of traffic (several hundred visitors a day on average), so this ends up be a huge savings to them. Of course in our current economy, any savings can be viewed as good savings.

From now this will be part of the standard reports I send people when I work on search engine optimization for clients.

If you are interested in expanding the reach of your website through search engine optimization, saving money on pay-per-click campaigns, or even finding out about how well your website is performing, please contact walt design and development for more information.

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