To be sure, let’s check what google thinks about W3C validation. If you put google.com address in W3C Validator you’ll get this result: 35 Errors, 2 warning(s)

W3C Validation and search engine optimization

In my rich experience I have noticed that many pages which has harder validation errors also have problems witch search engine spiders and bots. In such case that some of them aren’t indexed very well or not indexed at all because googlebot can’t render such bad written web pages.
Simple conclusion is that such kind of validation errors you should fix immediately. For other smaller or soft W3C validation errors, like the use of target=”_blank” with strict document type, don’t waste your time and money on them. If you client insist on W3C validation and they want to pay for it, just do it, otherwise you can freely ignore it.
Keep in mind thath validating of your web page trough W3C Validation doesn’t change your content and relevance for searched keywords.

W3C Validation & web programming/design

Let me explain, W3C validation has two types of errors. Hard validation errors and soft validation errors. An example of hard validation error will be for example an unclosed tag or any other tag elements. This can cause very serious issues, and such pages will for sure cause different problems on different web browsers. From look and design to functionality.
In my opinion good written and designed web page must have zeros of validation errors or very small number of such errors.
In other hand, don’t torture yourself to have clean and 100% W3C Validated web page. Keep your code clean, organized and after each big change, test your page in all popular web browsers. Starting from Firefox, IE, Google Chrome, Opera and Safari.

To validate or not to validate?

Big web companies such as google.com, yahoo.com, amazon.com doesn’t validate very well or in other words they have validation errors. Most of SEO experts agree with conclusion that having code that isn’t properly nested or has hard validation errors is for sure not good for SEO. Also, most of them agree that your web page will not have better ranking position if pass W3C validation with 100% success or 0 errors.

As final word, I would like to say keep your code and web page nice and clean, fix errors which cause bad rendering or parses issues. Check your web page at least on Firefox and Google Chrome, I other hand I do prefer Opera, so for me check it also in Opera. You can ignore Internet Explorer because every version has different problems. But anyway have in mind that more than 1/3 of Internet population still use some version of IE.

Google PageRank is a link analysis algorithm used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyper linked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web. The main purpose is to measure its relative importance within the set.
Google pagerank is important but as Google employee Susan Moskwa confirmed that the company had removed PageRank from its Webmaster Tools section. Her post said in part, “We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on Google PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true.”

So it is important, but not so much. In other words, if your web page is fully SEO optimized, then the second thing you need to consider is to get pagerank as high as possible.
If you have two similar web pages, not with same content but very similar content, and let’s say they both optimized with the same keywords (for example; computer online support). If we put that in Google web search, webpage with higher Google PageRank will be ranked first.

Google Pagerank algorithm

Google’s algorithm is very sophisticated, but if we try to simplify it then it will looks something like this:

Search Ranking = Relevance * PageRank

Relevance is the measure of how your website or even better; some of your web pages on your site matches the search phrase which end user entered in search engine. How some web page is more or less relevant it depends how much is SEO optimized. You can check your web site using our Check website tool in SEO tools menu. In short words it means how frequent searched words in phrase appearing on your page, how good is optimized title, meta tags, h1 tag on this page for such words.

In other hand, Google PageRank is an independent measure of Google’s perception of the quality, authority, credibility of an individual web page. It does not depend on any particular search phrase. Google pagerank reports quality of webpage in number range from 0 to 10, where 10 is the best possible ranking.
If they are two competitors webpage with the same relevance of keywords, then better ranking webpage on search engine will be website with better Google pagerank.

Your relevance is based on your webpage content which can you fix and arrange with our SEO tools “Check website”, but how to get better Google Pagerank? How Google Pagerank is calculated?

It is primarily determined by how many other websites actually are linking to your website. But not every link to your website is good. The website with higher Google Pagerank brings more credibility and higher pagerank to your site. For example, if you find some website with Google Pagerank of 4, it will brings you some good pagerank credibility. But if you find such 20 websites which will add backlink to your website, it will brings you even more credibility. Anyway, for sure it is better way to find one webpage with 6 or even 7 pagerank to put backlink to your website, that searching and seeking for 100 website with pagerank 3 or 4.

Pagerank scale

Pagerank is calculated on a logarithmic scale. This means that difference between pagerank 5 and pagerank 6 is about 7-10 times bigger than difference between pagerank 4 and pagerank 5.
Anyway, if you somehow get pagerank of 6, you’re likely well into the top of 0.1% of all websites on the whole world.

Pagerank legend:
0 … 3: very new sites or sites with small amount of inbound links
4 … 5: popular sites with a fair amount of inbound links
6 … 7: very popular sites that have hundreds of links, many of them quality inbound links
7 … 10: usually media brands, very big and popular media websites

What is your Google PageRank?

How can I know what is mine Google Pagerank? As simple as that. Just use our SEO tool for free. Choose “Pagerank checker” from SEO tool menu and find out what is your Google pagerank now.

Page title is one of the most important “tags” on your website. This tag is title of your web page and is normally displayed at the top of the browser window. If you want to have SEO optimized website read carefully this article and take care of your page title.

For most search engines, with google on my mind, the maximum lenght of page title shouldn’t be more than 70 characters. Before was 66 and now google support up to 70 characters. About 8-12 words will be good optimum. If your page title is longer than 70 characters, your page title will be cut off around 70 characet on the search engine result page.

Search engine bots use page title tags as the main source for determining of the page topic. All spiders and crawlers examine the page title and then translate the topic of the page. So, this mentioned is the main reason why is best practice to use optimized keywords in the page title, and not just to place them there but also place them as close to the beginning of the title as possible. Dont forget, page title will appear in search engine result pages as the link to your website, so users will click on your link if your page title is enough short, enough long and in point of interest of web surfer. If you optimize your page title you can notice better search engine ranking.

Below we will put five most important tips to have good optimized page title:
1. Page title must be short, not to short. Maximum size of 70 characters, don’t use 71 or 72 characters. Make sure it is not longer than 70 characters and not less than 30 characters. In other words, between 4 – 12 words. Don’t have it longer than 70 characters, otherwise it will be cut off in the middle.

2. Pay attention on keyword stuffing. Don’t repeat the same words over and over again. If you do, your title and web page will be assumed as spam.

3. Make sure that every page on your website has specific and universal page title. Don’t use the same title on all pages, or don’t use same page title on few pages.

4. Also make sure that the title is not only very well optimized, but that title is attractive to a human as well.

5. Don’t put your brand name or site name at the beggining of page title. Don’t waste your space. Rather put optimized keywords in page title, and put them to beginning as close as possible.

Extra tip: Google ideal page title is max. 70 and Yahoo 120 characters. So it is possible to have a primary page title of 70 and secondary page title of max. 120 characters. If you care about yahoo, otherwise just googlize your webpage.

First on Google? Why this headline doesn’t sound something like to be first on Yahoo, Bing or maybe even better; first on search engines? Reason is simple. Google is number one, most popular and most advanced search enigne in the world. If your site isn’t indexed on Google, or if you’re not in top 10, you lose many visitors.

Nowadays is common to say or even to hear that you need to be in the first page of Google results if you want to receive clicks. That means to be at the very top 10. That’s right, but to get even more visitors you need to be first. Why?
Because, if your site is on searched keyword on 9. or even 10. position you could end up with getting only 1% of all overall clicks. How to grab 99%? That’s impossible, but you can get more than 50% if you’re first on Google.

The most popular study about this topics comes from the Cornell University. They used an eye tracking technology to discover what percentage of users would click on each of the 10 results that appear on the first page on Google.
All results you can find are in table bellow and if you look at them you will understand why it is so important to be first on google.

On other study by Yahoo they are given different but almost similiar results. Please check both pictures below. You will notice that is very important to be first.

We can easily explain these percentages if we use numbers. Let’s say that you manage to rank in the first page of Google for a keyword or keywords that receives 1.000 searches per day. You could end up with receiving only 27 clicks daily if you’re on the ninth position. If you’re second you will receive big 115 visitors per day via Google. But even this number isn’t so big if you compare it with to be first on Google and get impressive 424 visitors.

We don’t have any other details or any other scientific proof to confirm numbers and percentage from table. Google for sure can gave us more detailed info, but we think they don’t have any interest to reveal them.

Anyway, conclusion is simple. If your goal is to get plenty of clicks from Google (or any other serach engine) you must be on first page of results. But if your appetite is even bigger and you wan’t to get most of your target keywords, for sure you must be first on Google.