funspot — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 15:46:17 +0000

Hi,
I want to thank everybody for your help. You've been much easier on me than I imagined. I got the site down to 3 errors, then after removing a tag, it went back to 13 errors! Fixing one problem, causes more. One big lesson: when using the "free" templates, validate them before doing anything. I'm putting together another site, and hopefully, it will be better. Again, thanks, and you will be hearing from me again soon, because I have so many questions, and I have finally met the right group of people to ask

Mike

steve40 — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 21:33:38 +0000

As far as being over “diehard” about whether your site validates 100%, that's debatable. On average not one site in ten on the web today will validate 100%, but they still get good rankings. I am not saying it would be good if your site fails miserably, and meets qualifications for the “top 100 sucking websites”, that would be good either. But I don’t think a few minor errors, would kill anyone's site. 100% validation; I think is more of a personal matter of pride.

Your websites content is where you get good, or bad results in your websites positioning. How well your content compliments the theme of your subject, is important. Keywords although relied on very lightly today, can make a difference if they have no bearing on the sites content whatsoever. And could possibly be considered “spamming” by some search engines. Example; I once read an article that said if you want a lot of visitors, put something like “Nudes” in your keywords. That might have worked in days of old, but not today.

Your site title is one of the most important of your meta-tags, it should contain at least two, or more keywords from your sites content, per page. But not be more than 59 characters in length, you description is also important, and should be concise and to the point, it should not contain more than 200 - 225 characters. All of this should come from your pages text content, and not be something irrelevant you just dreamed up.

Avoid “doorway pages”, and “flash intro's” like the plague of death. Search engines will not crawl these pages, and will not continue on to your homepage, where-ever it might happen to be. Avoid all animated porky pig characters, and the elevator background music. This might not have a lot of bearing on the search engines, but believe me it does on those who visit your site. Do not use little animations, images, or bouncing balls for your navigation. Use text links, and keep them plain and simple, although I have read Googles new spiders will! crawl image links don’t depend on it.

Make your site so it will display somewhat correctly even if your CSS page doesn’t load, or if granddaddy comes on your site with his old 486, and windows 3.1.
Avoid the use of Java, or Javascript, if you use any make it small and not something that directly affects your sites display. I used a little script in my links that keeps explorer from making those little dashed boxes around them, but if your browser does not have java it wont hurt the links display, or function. Something like that is not so bad, but again is not necessary.

Write good clean HTML and avoid exotic scripting, pay attention to your sites content, and you should have no trouble ranking as well as the theme of your site will allow. But face it some themes are so competitive, and some are not so popular, as to keep your site from ever getting into the top ranking webpage list.

Firegirl — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 17:22:06 +0000

I have to reiterate what Steve40 said. If you use link exchanges, or copy link code in any way it is going to mess up your code. I have to fix almost every link I put on my site. Most people just don't care if their code is valid or not. What I did was take all code that is NOT mine off each page, one page at a time, and validated my code until it passed, then added back the links I wanted and fixed them. A lot of code that you copy will say not to change it in any way, but if they write bad html, I'm going to change it if I can. And if you can't, you just have to make the decision if you want to keep it or not. I just put a video on my site that made my site not pass validation, but I decided to leave it there. The debate on whether code validation helps search engines crawl your site goes on to this day....

searchrentals12 — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 16:54:57 +0000

First of all, haven't declared a docutype, and make sure you use html 4.0/XHTML Transitional.

For example put this at the very top of your Webpage:

Megan — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 19:40:56 +0000

I think you might need a better grounding in the basics. There are a lot of things you need to know about proper HTML. Firstly, all tags need to be nested properly (...text rather than ...test. All tags must be closed. Depending on the doctype you're using, some tags are depreciated and should be sused anymore (such as for example - should be used instead). A lot of attributes that use to be allowed are not anymore. Again, that depends on the doctype. You will also want to work on getting rid of all the font tags and replacing them with CSS. The new direction in web design is to completely separate structure from presentation, so the HTML just defines a framework and then all the visual effects are done with CSS.

From the errors I'm seeing on the main page right now, you mostly need to make sure each tag is opened and closed and that they don't overlap at all.

By the way, in case you didn't know, the doctype (document type) tells the browser which version of HTML you are using, and whether you are using strict or transitional. I see you're using HTML 4.01 transitional which is a great first step. Once youg et this validating you can change that to strict and go from there.

I hope that's helpful - I don't have time to go through all that in detail right now

steve40 — Sat, 15 Jul 2006 12:15:44 +0000

Microsoft had? - go run their home page through WDG ( a littel stiffer check than W3C ). They still have quite a few. I didn't count them but I would guess in the order of betwen 25 - 30, that's more than I will tolerate.

That's why I recommended the html editor, he will learn to fix problems quicker than having to go back and forth on line. Then WDG will get all of the more exotic errors. CSE Validator is a basic html, and light style editor and will catch around 95% of the errors on the page. When I copied and pasted his code it came out with around 50, and still would they were not the no doctype sort of errors.

Missing end tags, tags that had not been opened closed, disallowed things like table height, bad nesting, the & with no amp; and stuff like that. Really nothing major but lots of little bugs running around.

Busy — Sat, 15 Jul 2006 10:52:49 +0000

For some strange reason your site is in a half frame, the reason I say half frame is because there is only one frameset (one other page being used when there should be at least two

If you want to keep the frames (is bad idea to), you have to validate ALL the pages.

The frame page (that has the framesets etc) needs a DOC tag
Change <script language="javascript"> to <script type="text/javascript">
Once adding the frameset DOC tag most of the other errors will disappear

The index page ...
take out height="126" from the table tag on line 87
remove the tag on line 214
remove (3) on line 218
remove from line 220
If you are able to edit your affiliate code change all & to &
on line 222 there should be an img ( on line 223
remove from line 341

Thats just going from the errors shown from w3c.org, there are a couple of others, but fix these ones and when done let us know and we can work out the rest.
The best way to learn HTML is from these errors, work out what/why/where the errors are and fix them, most of them are very easy, as 90% of HTML tags have start and end tags ( start and end) and your errors mostly show missing ends tags, plus a lot of affiliate errors being caused by the & symbol.
Only 42 errors on this page, thats not bad, Microsoft had over 100 on msn last year

steve40 — Sat, 15 Jul 2006 03:30:11 +0000

I copy and past links also, and you would not believe how many I have to fix. But those kinds of errors are not a bad problem, but they will still show up.

I have an editor like that, called Top Sytle Pro. Its a good editor but it likes to add closing tags for you, since I am used to closing my own it gives me fits. I generally don't use it, but I keep it because it will let me check pages in three different browsers on the desktop, without going on line.

Go and find an html checker by the name of "CSE HTML Validator" on line. Download and install it. There are two versions one is free, that is the light version, that's the one I use. Its a bit better than going online, and checking with W3C or one of those checkers, because it will show you exactly where the error is. Also it will prompt you about what it will take to fix it.

After you have fixed all the problems it shows you, go online and type in WDG that will find more, but by that time you will already have 95% of them fixed, and it wont be so hard. Maybe?.

funspot — Sat, 15 Jul 2006 02:23:44 +0000

One more thing!
The validator finds errors in the affiliate links from linkshare. I copy and paste them as is.

funspot — Sat, 15 Jul 2006 02:06:05 +0000

Thanks, Steve
Some strange things: I edit in the html editor, but when I view it in the text editor (on the web host), it puts all these extra tags in, that I didn't place. I avoid that text editor at all cost, now. Second, when you view the same site at this address http://www.computerproductsunlimited.com/testsite/index4.html ,it only shows 5 errors. I've tried copying it to index.html in my root directory, but the same site will then have tons of errors.
Again, I want to stress, that do not have experience in this area, but any help you could give would be greatly appreciated
Tnanks