Conservative estimates suggest that more than 30% of all website pages have some HTML coding errors.  Internet browsers are designed to ‘forgive’ many of the common errors and render internet pages correctly.

Search engines, however, are not as forgiving and more sensitive to poor coding practices because browsers on cell phones and PDAs are not as robust.  If incorrect HTML code causes an error, a search engines may abandon the page before it can be downloaded for analysis.

Pages that have excessive broken links may experience ranking demotions because a search engine does not want to be indirectly associated with a poorly maintained website.

Testing HTML code is a simple task of code validation.  Online tools offered by W3C are particularly helpful: http://validator.w3.org/.
Broken links may be tested using desk-top applications like Xenu: http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html.

Get PDF>>