Cleanse wordpress posts from xhtml and html
warnings to improve your blog SEO using wordpress tidy-up
plugin
I have noticed that my posts has a lot of missing html tags and
generally the html code is garbled and has, somewhere in the blog
posts I have wrongly placed html and xhtml, tags left open and many
other tiny mistakes which we usually do when we write our
posts.
What makes things even worser is that I use to type my blog posts
from my server shell using nanoblogger. Thereon the blog post is
imported into wordpress.
The resulting garbled html has many implications on how the user
visualizes this posts but maybe the most crucial consequence is
that the produced xhtml output has many errors and therefore it's
not compatible to the w3c html standards.
In one of my previous posts I have talked about the natural results
following a non w3c compliant html websites and how that would
reduce pagerank and the overall indexing likeness and search engine
interests into the particular website.
Therefore I wanted my wordpress blog to have as less errors as
possible and looked for a plugin that will be able to produce
information about my blog posts errors and incompatibilities with
the official html standards and possible allow me to easily
automatically resolve the xhtml incompatatibilities.
Some research in Google on the topic on how can I solve my post
warnings and errors has led me to
a nice wordpress
plugin to cleanse your html garbage and errors called
tidy-up
Tidy up does walk around all your posts and creates a list of
xhtml incompatabilities, errors and warnings as well provides with
an automated way to resolve html warnings and errors inside your
blog articles
This is pretty quick and handy. Since using the full automated
features of
tidy up might be a good idea, I personally
preferred to use the plugin in a half automated way, by requesting
tidy up to report about my post issues and then following each of
the warnings or errors and using the
tidy button or
the
edit button in order to fix each of the problematic post
areas.
Here is a screenshot on the simple but functional tidy up
interface:
Note that in order to be able to use
wordpress you will also
need to install
tidy on your
system
Installing tidy-up in wordpress is a piece of cake and is
absolutely identical to the normal way we install a new wordpress
plugin:
To install download tidy-up.zip to your blog/wp-content/plugins
directory and unzip the tidy-up archive:
server:~# cd /var/www/blog
server:/var/www/blog# wget
http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/tidy-up.zip
server:~# unzip tidy-up.zip
Then in your admin panel in wordpress go to:
Plugins -> Inactive and Enable the
Tidy Up plugin
pressing the enable button.
To start using the plugin navigate to:
Tools -> Tidy up
Now enjoy cleaning up your html from irregularities :)