HOW TO: Build a XHTML Valid Wordpress Blog with DISQUS Plugin

The last couple of days, I was reading about how to get your site to rank higher in Google. There are many tweaks you can do to insure that your site is Google friendly. One of the controversial topics was whether having your pages XHTML/HTML valid helps in SEO ranking or not. It’s clear that if your site has made a mess out of the HTML code, a search engine spider might have a tough time reading and parsing your page, which might lead to errors and in turn lower ranking. So, I decided that it’s better to be safe than sorry, and started converting the entire blog to XHTML 1.0 Transitional valid.

Thoughtpick Valid XHTML

Let’s start…

The main issues targeted by this post

On the Thoughtpick blog, we have a few plugins that were causing XHTML validation issues. Mainly:

• DISQUS Commenting System: At least 4 or 5 XHTML validation errors were generated by this plugin. The solutions are listed below.
• Wordpress 2.8+ “role” problem, and how to fix it.
• Youtube and Vimeo embed object issues: the <embed> tag is invalid for XHTML 1.0, to fix the issue, I wrote a small function.

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