View the HTML source of the home page on your website - are you satisfied with out it looks? Most websites I look at (that don't specialise in website design or SEO) always look terrible. The top of the page is filled with JavaScript image rollover code and let's not get started on the unnecessary Meta tags. Recent activity suggests that search engines may favour those tidy websites over your error-ridden mess that you call your own. There are many benefits which would suggest that it does, these include:

• Faster load times.
• Less bandwidth.
• Easier to update.
• Smaller HTML files.
• Less stress on the server.
• Less chance of a programming error.
• Less chance of a broken link / 404 page.
• Semantic web is more accessible to all users.

These examples not only help search engine spiders to crawl your site, but also make it more enjoyable for the user (faster load times) and easier for you to update at a later time. In my own experience, this seems to help with MSN Live and Yahoo! rankings more than with Google.

Tidy code is easy to achieve, just follow these steps:

• Remove the unnecessary Meta tags.
• Store all JavaScript in external .js files.
• Ditch tables and use <div> tags to position your content.
• Use CSS to style your tags.
• Store all styling in external .css files.
• Validate your HTML, just to make sure.