A List Apart: Using XHTML/CSS for an Effective SEO Campaign. That's Search Engine Optimisation, for people who like their acronyms expanded. While the copy of the article isn't that great; the point is good - valid XHTML will give better search rankings than tag soup. To put it another way; if your code is lying about your content*; your rankings will suffer.
* What do I mean by that? Well, if you mark up a heading as a piece of text with a font tag; that's misrepresenting that piece of text - in short, lying. If you mark up the page's top heading with an H1 tag; the document is specifically stating that the piece of text is significant - it's the heading, and that's the truth. Computers are not humans, they will believe whatever you tell them. They will not interpret a big bit of text at the start of a document as a level-one heading. They will interpret an H1 as a level-one heading. So, don't let your code lie about your content. Simple, really.
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