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 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.