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Today's webmasters face many challenges when it comes to launching and maintaining a successful website. While design and content are key, its also true that driving new visitors to your site is often dependant upon outside sources. Take for example the extremely important role Google plays in promoting your site. A quick scan of your web server logs probably reveals that much of the search based traffic you receive comes from Google. Furthermore, having Google index your pages also effects how accurate revenue generators like Ad Words function on your site.

So how do you know if your getting the most out of Google? By in large, you want your site to be fully searchable by Google and you want your page rank to be as high as possible. Ultimately you want your page to be the first result when someone types in a particular search. Unfortunately deciphering features like Google's Page Rank system is largely like trying to reverse engineer a black box. But one web design guru recently conducted a test to isolate the importance of well formed HTML and semantics on how high web pages rank in Google searches. The findings were somewhat surprising, especially when it comes to the use of valid HTML code.

Google is continuously tweaking its search engine capabilities, however it's safe to assume that several practices will help you achieve better, and more prevalent search results. The first is the use of well formed HTML. The W3C has mandated a set of standards governing code that renders web pages. For the most part, browsers honor these standards and attempt to render every page as accurately as possible. The problem is that HTML 4.01 and XHMTL 1.0 are notoriously difficult to comply with. Any number of infractions will deem your page "non-compliant". However the good news is that nearly 99% of all pages on the Internet do not conform in some way to the W3C standard.

How do you know which standards Google dings you for. Well for starters, according to some tests, Google will exclude your site if it contains invalid tables. In other words, tables that are not formatted properly, or contain empty cells can seriously impact your ranking. In fact in some circumstances your site won't show up at all.

So what can you do? For starters you can typically achieve 80% compliance by installing a compatible Content Management Software (CMS) package. While it won't solve all of your problems it will help eliminate most of the common bugs associated with generating your own static web pages. It's also a lot easier to update, which is why blogs are so popular these days. If you must generate static pages, or can't deploy a CMS on your server, try using standards compatible tools like Dreamweaver. Avoid notoriously incompliant software like FrontPage.

The next thing you'll want to try is to run your site through the W3C validator. It will highlight problem areas and attempt to give you an explanation of why your code is wrong. It also has a feature to point you toward the offending line of code. Keep in mind that if you use CMS, some of these errors could be in third party modules you've installed. You may need to track down the original developer and ask them to correct the problem. However, most of the time the error will be with some content you've added. This is easy to correct and usually concerns some of the more common formatting tags used on most sites.

While you may not be able to get your error count down to zero, you should aim for no more than 10 - 12 errors per page. Keep in mind that some errors show up multiple times. Always avoid errors with tables, and if possible deploy a site that uses Cascading Style Sheets instead of tables for formatting. If you are lucky enough to have no errors you will be given a green light and can proudly display the "Compliance" button on your site.

It may seem like a serious amount of work, but not only will you have the joy of knowing that Google loves you, but also that your site should render, or display the same across multiple browsers.

Check the validation for this page vs. The validation for the front page

Note that this page doesn't validate because of an error in the comment add-on module.