What is W3C Validation and how it affects SEO?

W3C refers to the World Wide Web
Consortium, which provides a
validation service, named as the
W3C Validation which checks the
validity of the web documents by
checking and verifying the codes of
the web pages.
This although is not a full website
check tool, but still it confirms the
technical specifications of the
website by checking the language
that the online machines
understand. With the minimal
errors on the coding of the web
pages, the site’s quality increases
and this also changes the way a
website appears to the visitors and
search engines.
The validator service processes
documents of many languages,
most importantly HTML (through
HTML 4.01) and XHTML (1.0 and 1.1)
family, MathML, SMIL and SVG (1.0
and 1.1, including the mobile
profiles). The validator needs to be
confirming the language, which
needs a declaration from the
website.
Why to validate a web
page with W3C Validation?
It helps in debugging – Usually the
web browsers try to parse the
worst code in the HTML pages, but
some of the coding mistakes are
such that can’t be parsed by the
browsers. Here’s where the W3C
validation helps, and debugs the
website issues, mainly with the
HTML codes.
Validation of the web pages even
eases the maintenance of the
websites, as if you try to maintain
the same from the beginning stage
of the site, the maintenance of the
design is easier in the later stages.
How does the W3C
Validation help in SEO?
The validation directly doesn’t affect
the SEO and the search engine
rankings, but there are a few coding
issues that might sometime help in
the rankings. None of the SEO
experts or webmasters take the
W3C validation as a part of the SEO
practice, but it is still said that some
missing end quote or duplicate tag
may cause a potential problem to
the websites in the eyes of search
engines.
In a survey, it was found that just
around 5% of the entire web pages
pass the W3C validation, still most
of the websites hold a strong
position in the search result pages.
The W3C validation is not a SEO
standard, but if your website is W3C
validated, then the website would be
easily crawled by the robots of
search engines like Google, Yahoo,
Live etc. who check for the different
alt attributes etc. while indexing the
pages.
So, keep the fact in consideration
that the correct HTML or respective
coded pages helps a lot in better
indexing of the web pages in search
engines, but minimal errors in the
coding won’t affect much.