My first post on here, so hello everybody.

I hope the forum can help me with my website and I hope I can help where ever I can too. I have a lot of experience in graphic design if that is any help round here!

Firstly, what is the best way to valid all my pages to W3c standards. is to just put each page into the validaotr and read the error messages. I have downloaded note+, can that help?

My website needs some attention on this matter!

Many thanks
George

Moved to appropriate forum as it is NOTHING to do with SEO.

Oh bad start. Sorry, I thought w3c was important for SEO hence me posting here.

Nope not even slightly.

http://www.webmaster-talk.com/seo-ta...-rankings.html
http://www.webmaster-talk.com/seo-ta...lid-xhtml.html
http://www.webmaster-talk.com/the-go...mportance.html

Ok I just thought that you should validate the code by W3C so you make it easier for the SE spiders. (http://www.jimwestergren.com/my-guid...o-and-success/)

Those threads are all over 2 years old. Nothing changed I take it?

May I ask where you have put my post?

Cheers

Sorry, stopped taking any notice of that article after the first paragraph mentioned KEI as being a "useful" metric.

Just another clueless "expert" regurgitating half-truths and myths.

Oh and that article is FIVE years old and it wasn't true then either.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPBACTS-tyg

Fair enough.

Do you know of a better SEO check list?

NOPE because thay are mostly based on the same crap mis-information.

But reading the High Rankings Tips for newbies

Thanks a lot for your help this evening. I am finding your link very useful!

Chris, do you have a check list on the technical things for SEO by any chance?

Is it just mainly:

• Robots.txt
• Sitemap.xml
• .htaccess / 404 / 304
• Site speed
• webmastertools

Cheers
George

Originally Posted by airsupplies

Chris, do you have a check list on the technical things for SEO by any chance?

Is it just mainly:

• Robots.txt
• Sitemap.xml
• .htaccess / 404 / 304
• Site speed
• webmastertools

Cheers
George

Robots.txt is nothing to do with SEO, it is a exclusion protocol to tell compliant bots where NOT to crawl.

XML sitemaps never, ever used one, I prefer to FIX any crawling problem rather than patching it up.

I assume you mean a 302/301 HTTP response not 304. 404 errors are a fact of life on the Internet so not really a SEO issue provided that pages that are gone DO send a 404 response.

Site speed? total red herring, the usual FUD from Google. A slow site is a USABILITY concern NOT SEO.

webmaster tools? What about it?

Thanks again Chris.

I just meant webmastertools is very useful for spotting crawl errors and keywords.

I have learnt a lot in the last 12 hours! Cheers.

Is there anything else you can recommend regards SEO, or shall i just stick to the top ten points on the highrankings link.

You have probably worked out, I am getting a little over concerned/worried that i might be doing something wrong technically when I should be concentrating my time on good content and making our website a valuable source of info.

As a side note, when i refreshed this page this morning, AVG Free virus software flagged it. Don't know if its anything to do with that last post. THought i would mention it.

To be nonest I've found Google WMT pretty inaccurate at reporting "errors".
It often comes up with all manner of "errors" that don't exist when you check the pages, and your site logs are a much better source of data for keywords etc. They show you ALL the traffic and clickthroughs not just the one that came from Google Search.

The biggest thing is not to get bogged down in specifics, there are no hard and fast "rules", there are no specific numbers for various "metrics", no magic formulas. Each site/page/marketplace is different entity, only practice, experience and REAL observations will tell you what you need to know about the sites you are dealing with. Do not assume that because you did A,B & C on Page 'M' and it worked that it will also work on page 'N'.

Not every site/page needs a massive link building campaign to market it.

AND do NOT accept "expert" information blindly, no matter how many times you see the same "advice" published.

Question everything.
Test everything
and observe everything.

You can't always learn a lot from looking at page that is above yours for a given phrase, but you can learn a hell of a lot by reading about the ones who failed and are whinging about it in forums.
Understand how, why and where they went wrong is a better lesson than trying to work out what somebody got right.

and always remember you are optimising and promoting for SEARCH not Search Engines.

Great advice. I would agree with everything. There seems to be a lot of BS in SEO. I guess anyone that knows enough, knows this already.

Finally,

It often comes up with all manner of "errors" that don't exist when you check the pages, and your site logs are a much better source of data for keywords etc.

Sorry, what are site logs? Google Analytics?

No. Your webserver creates a log entry (two for Apache errors are logged separately) of every request made to the server and every response that was sent to the useragent (browser, crawler, scraper etc)

Analysing these is an absolutely invaluable source of information, there are several tools around for doing this and you quite possibly have them already available on your hosting.

Google analytics is a good way of monitoring the site activity, however it is javascript based and therefore will miss recording visits by js disabled useragents, but it is better than nothing.

Ok, I will get on to that then.

Great help! And thanks for the welcome to the forum.

NP Maybe I should move the thread back to the SEO forum now

I found this thread very informative..thanks

could anyone tell my why targeting w3c standards is not a seo technique. From what i know, webmaster tools has a section titled html errors.

There is a section called HTML Suggestions which relates to duplicated titles and meta descriptions, but I've never seen a HTML errors section.

Would you care to enlighten us.