Web site optimization for errors
The erros found in the web site have direct impact on both; search engines and human visitors.
Web page errors and search engines’ robots
Search engines are based on automated software agents that visit the web pages and collect information about their contents and links to other web pages.
The collected information can be of two main types: textual, which is the content that is also visible to the human visitors and information about the web page layout and web site structure.
The textual information, commonly called content of the site or content of the web page is stored in the search engine database. At a later stage it is used to build the search engine index and in fact, it is one of the primary items that determine whether the web page URL will be shown in the search results page and at which position. When the search engines analyse the information collected in their database, they actually "read" the web page content and classify it depending on the words and phrases found in it. If there are spelling errors, obviously the search engine will either not recognize some words and phrases, either will recognize them as different, but not the one that the web author initially meant. Hence, when searching for these keywords, the people will not see these pages, as they will not be considered as a related to these serch terms.
Another important issue is the errors in the web page code. When the web page code has errors, they could trick the search engines understand its content in different way or even to render part of the web page unreadable for the search engine. Thus, some or all of the content will not be included in the search engine database.
Web page errors and the human visitors
The spelling errors, typos and the bad grammar might be used by web site visitors as an indicator about the quality of the services they might expect from the web site owner. Many typos and spelling errors means low quality.
There are plenty of methods to keep the web page free of spelling errors. Many web design programms have build in spelling checker. The question is to remember to use it after the web page is edited. Many web masters use MS Word or other similar word processing programs to prepare the content of the web page and afterwards only copy the text in to the web page and make the final HTML formatting.
The errors in the web page code may have the same impact on the web site vizitors experience, like it is with the search engines. If there is serious error in the code, then the web page might not load properly and stay inaccessible for the visitor. Additionaly, the visitors browsing experience might be affected by the web page compatibility with their web browser. Most web designers, when create a new web page layout, check wthether it loads properly in all major browsers: Internet Explorer, Opera and Mozila FireFox.
For both, the search engines and human visitors it would be best to check every different web page layout for validation. One of the services that can be used is the Markup Validation Service at http://validator.w3.org/ It is "a free service that checks Web documents in formats like HTML and XHTML for conformance to W3C Recommendations and other standards".
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