Internet Explorer, Firefox and other browsers can be very tolerant of programming errors in your website. 

And when you make an error it is easy to see when the browser doesn’t like it. 

However, Google and the other search engines use proprietary software to analyse web content and do not tell you when they don’t understand your website. 

This can lead to pages or sections of pages being ignored by the search engines and you are none the wiser. 

In their Webmaster Guidelines, Google advise webmasters to check that their HTML is valid.  Failure to do this can lead to poor rankings without any clear pointer to the source of the problem. 

We have recently seen a number of sites that were only partially indexed by the search engines and where the code contained numerous HTML errors.  Fixing the errors quickly improved the results. 

You can check your code at http://validator.w3.org/ - remember to check the whole site not just the home page. 

Ensuring that the HTML code on your website is valid is a essential step to achieving good rankings for the search engines.

Have you ever wondered which results Google displays when you click the box ‘pages from the UK’ or ‘páginas de España’ or any other geographically based search? 

A website is associated with a country either by its domain name or by the IP address of the server on which it is hosted. 

So if you have a .com domain and it’s hosted in France then you will not appear in a ‘pages from the UK’ search.  But if it’s a .co.uk domain then it should appear. 

For example a UK client with a .com domain selling into the UK market moved their hosting to the USA to take advantage of lower costs.  Unfortunately they found that their site disappeared from the ’search the UK’ results.   

It is not always obvious where a hosting company has its servers - a major UK hosting company has its servers in Germany.   

Of course, a lot of your potential clients will normally choose the ’search the web’ option so it won’t always matter but most small businesses would prefer not to risk losing even a small number of business opportunities.     

Therefore if your site doesn’t appear in the searches that you would expect, ask your hosting company where their servers are.