Validation Novice here- Generally speaking, what are the seo benefits having a your site validated?

There are SEO benefits to authoring your content with semantic markup. Authoring lean, meaningful content with web standards helps people find your content by wrapping it in appropriate semantics that machines and search engines like Google understand and respond to.

There are no SEO benefits to having your site validate. But authoring valid content helps you check your site for errors that may cause display or function problems in one or more browsers or devices. And striving for validation is a best practice of standards-based design.

Sometimes you can’t achieve validation—for instance, when a third-party ad stream inserts invalid markup on your site.

And sometimes you can’t maintain validation—for instance, when a person charged with updating the site’s content has the ability to insert malformed HTML into a page.

But achieving validation, at least during the initial template development phase, helps assure that your web content will display and function correctly in as many browsers and devices as possible, thus getting your message (and branding) in front of people once they find your content.