Internet and Businesses Articles

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 current site is http://www.mobile4-u.com

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