Content is most important for ranking

ditpaintball

It seams that even a badly designed website can still attain a decent search ranking. My site for example 400 errors show up!!

I will say that i am not developer or designer so don't have the know how to fix all these errors, I just used a pre made phpbb based package put fill it will loads and loads of relevant content. I post up topics daily as relative news stories breaks and I title the stories as I suspect people to enter them into google and then I usually come up top over much bigger, international websites.

tomED

ditpaintball wrote: »

It seams that even a badly designed website can still attain a decent search ranking. My site for example 400 errors show up!!

It's the age old argument and you are 100% correct.
The only difference properly structure HTML/xHTML will do for your ranking is help search engines index your content better.

It's common sense, if the search engine spiders can interpret your site easily it will index your site better. If it doesn't understand your sites code, it will find it more difficult to find the juicy content.

Moonstar

Some people are a stickler for adhering strictly to the standards, however then we have companies like Microsoft helping us by making their own "standards" :pac:

One thing though, if your HTML is especially corrupted, you increase the chance of cross-browser screwups in rendering your page. Things like unterminated <div> sections can play havoc when you're trying to figure out why this page looks ok in one browser, but not in the other one...

caminowebmaster

matt cutts of google confirmed last year that code does not to validate, as it would be crazy to knock out old very relevant sites because of this. google read htlm (mostly) - if it displays...