HTML Validation is important because of how search engines treat a website on a programmatic level. Search Engines discover your website and all of the site pages using a program called a search engine spider, bot, or crawler. These names are all essentially synonymous. The key takeaway is that because these programs are the method search engines use to discover your site, you have to provide your site to them in a logical, structured, and non-broken format.

Invalid HTML is a website that is broken from a programming standpoint. While the site may look just great to you and I when you surf onto it in your browser, you have to realize that browsers have built-in forgiveness with how they render your website. This means that the browser may compensate and try to make your site appear not broken. Sometimes the HTML that is invalid does not effect the layout or the appearance of the site, but rather the behavior or logic of the site.

Imagine calling a taxi and telling them directions to your house. You start to provide those directions, but midway through you start speaking in nonsense and gibberish. The taxi wouldn't have much luck in finding your house. The same is true for websites that are syntactically broken and have invalid HTML.

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