Writing code for a web application that is XHTML 1.0 Strict Doc-type for XHTML Strict Validation is not an easy process.

Writing code for a web application that is XHTML 1.0 Strict Doc-type for XHTML Strict Validation is not an easy process. Alot of people in the industry claim that writing valid code is not necessarily for top placement on Google and other search engines, at Your SEO Firm we believe this is not the case! The whole reasoning behind html validation is for cross browser compatibility, that is the webs
ite will look and function the same be it processed via Google Chrome, Fire Fox or Internet Explorer.

You may wonder about some of the big players in the online world and if they use compliant code or not, well lets look and see.

sears / 266 Errors, 288 warning(s)
ibm / Passed
dell / 668 Errors, 89 warning(s)
youtube / 170 Errors, 5 warning(s)

These are some of the biggest online websites in the world with the most internet traffic and of the 4 only 1 passed validation but yet they all hold some pretty high spots on Google and other search engines for their respective fields of expertise.

So we tell you that validation is critical but yet these big players can skate without using valid code? They can and this is why: 1.) the websites have been around for a very long time and have LOTS of pages indexed in the search engines which already give them a heads up in the game 2.) being household names these sites get ALOT of traffic which also increases their ranking on the search engines.

Basically these websites are just "too big to fail" in the words of our government. Most websites do not have the luxury that these websites have and in the competitive online market you need to take advantage of any resource out that to give you one up on your competition.

Some SEO companies will even come out and lie to you and say that without having valid HTML your site will not rank, this is just not the case as we proven above.

In short there is no one thing you can do to rank in the search engines but with a little effort you can rank above your competition!