Checking that your HTML follows the standards for web coding is crucial, as it may affect the way your pages are shown if they are a incorrect. This is one of the first things you should check after you get your site goes live. If it is not properly interpreted, it may not get the attention it deserves from the search engines.
To check if your pages validate, run them through the W3C Organization validator and it’ll give you a listing of error messages. Since you want to see where the errors are in the HTML code it’s important that you select the “Show Source” checkbox when you’re validating to see the line number with the errors.
Oh, and don’t despair if your site doesn’t validate right away–my first site had over 500 errors when I first ran it through the W3C validator. But often errors are related so fixing one can solve several others at the same time.
Spending a couple of hours fixing your code is time well used if it helps the search engines to more easily index your whole site instead of getting distracted by stupid HTML errors!
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