osCommerce HTML Validation
Since HTML formats are issued by W3C.org, a valid web page complies to the W3C.org HTML formats and recommendations.
It has almost never been a case when web browsers required the pages to be 100% correct and valid HTML Almost any web browser allows for certain inconsistencies in HTML script that web masters sometimes use to create impressively looking web sites. Web browsers always try to find a way round such inconsistencies and compensate in different ways that merely depend on each particular browser. A web page with no inconsistencies is valid.
If so do the web browsers, if they allow for certain freedom in authoring HTML pages – does it mean the search engines ought to do the same? Actually the answer is – yes, this is how the search engines try to perform. Search engine bots try to extract as much content and textual information from web sites as possible to perform the most precise analysis of the extracted data. But what if a web page is not valid HTML, but rather a freely designed HTML pages with some parts of it not being valid accordingly to the formats? In that case search engine bots may incorrectly extract information from the web site, or miss some textual information that contains important keywords.
So there exist at least the following reasons to have web site pages valid:
- to make web pages look in the same way in different browsers that support the same HTML formats
- to avoid confusion and incorrect processing by different Search Engine bots, and allow the most of the important information to be properly extracted and indexed from the web pages
Even though there exist certain reasons not to validate the web sites (valid pages may not look and work as intended originally, time and costs involved may be quite valuable), for SEO purposes its recommended to keep osCommerce online store valid HTML.
What should be validated in osCommerce
All osCommerce online stores are similar at least in the file and web site structure. Whatever the actual names of the files are, it makes sense to have the following pages / files valid HTML:
- main (home) page
- category listing page
- advanced search page
- product information page
- shopping cart page
- information pages (like About Us, Terms and Conditions, etc)