Diaries of a Webmaster, Entry 4: Some Tips for Better HTML |
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This installment of Diaries of a Webmaster is going to get a little technical, be warned. Today we are going to talk about HTML validation and page load speed optimization. Both are factors in Google’s latest ranking algorithm, and both are just good web design practices.
HTML validation is handled by the W3 consortium (W3C). This consortium maintains web standards across different technologies (HTML, XML, CS, JavaScript, etc.). Their validation service (http://validator.w3.org/) checks the web page that you point it to for syntactically correct HTML. Basically, it checks whether or not your HTML is correct based on the standards it maintains. Some common errors found are tags not being closed and images not having alt tags.
It is a good idea to keep your website’s HTML valid for a couple of reasons. The first is to make sure your site looks the same on all browsers. While valid HTML will not guarantee this, it gives it a much better shot. The second reason, search engines like Google prefer valid HTML for their results. Pages without valid HTML may get a worse PageRank from Google. This penalty is small enough however, that larger sites may ignore validation all together.
The next topic covers page load speeds. Google’s latest algorithm now takes into account how fast your page loads in its PageRank. In order to help with this Google released a plugin for Firebug (amazing web development plugin for Firefox) that will analyze your page and give you recommendations on how to optimize it. Common errors I have found with my sites are images not having their dimensions explicitly defined and “serving static content from a cookieless domain”. The first one is easy to fix by adding some simple CSS to each image defining their dimensions. The second is trickier to fix. If you are like us and use the Google Analytics service, you are going to be out of luck most likely. The Google Analytics tracking code adds cookies to everything that your domain serves. I am toying with the idea of dropping Google Analytics and just using the tracking service provided by our web host.
There are some more advanced tips and tricks for both valid HTML and page load optimization but I will not cover them here. I suggest you use both of these tools to make your website as compliant as it can be to these criteria.
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