Keeping it clean could give you a boost.
By Mark White

Everyone is striving to be at the top of the

pile, we all want to get a better google PR and want this

to reflect in more visitors to our site. But after we have

followed all the advice about keyword placement and alt

tags is there anything else we can do?

I recently asked Tinu Abayomi-Paul the well

respected google expert from freetrafficdirectory.com

if having tidy html coding helped.

She told me that although there is no absolute proof that

it helped she had noticed that site's with good xhtml

code often seemed to get a higher ranking .

It is my belief that when the spiders visit they prefer

a clean house.

So how do you know if your pages are up to

scratch and up to search engine standards? There are a couple

of sites that you can visit and get your pages spring cleaned

for free so it's worth a visit.

The first site is site

valet and this is in my humble opinion the most useful

as they use an online version of html tidy , the program

was originated by Dave Raggett and now at Source

forge and it offers to tidy your pages straight off

your hard drive, did I mention the word free, yes this valuable

resource is free.

The big bonus for me is that if Tinu is correct then this

site can convert from html to xhtml, what a bonus it could

be to raise my google PR at the same time as making my code

better. The online report gives you a not to complicated

list of warnings about missing tags, attributes and offers

advice about what you could add or change for people with

non graphical browsers.

The magic is that site valet gives you your page code back

in tidy form, just copy and paste the code for a spotless

site. As well as tidy the site offers the more rigorous

but more technical page tidy so if you know exactly what

you want and are a techie then the page tidy option is for

you.

The other site is net

mechanic.com and is incredibly useful, they offer a

free limited look at your site and offer advice similar

to site valet. You can get a report for up to 5 pages of

your site free and they offer other resources for you to

try such as image optimisation programs, online link checking

and browser compatibility checks.

The cost of a years membership to sort out your site is

really good value and well worth it if you have a larger

site as the tools could save you weeks of work over a year.

If you use the full resources available to

you on both of these site then you should end up with very

clean precise code that has the engines all in a tizzy over

your level of code hygiene, they may even reward you with

a better rank.

About the author.

Mark white has built and run 3 sites for the last 4 years,

has worked in I.T. for 15 years and is

actively involved in traffic/search engine related sites.

His sites are

$10

dollar downloads.com

sunspeks.com

and phone-bits.com

Please feel free to reproduce this article

ensuring all content and links are left intact.