If there is one thing I’ve heard from Yahoo! representatives speaking at search conferences it is that Yahoo! ranking algorithm for its natural results is a stickler for clean code. It seems Yahoo! looks for clean code as one of the indicators for a site’s quality, which makes some sense.

This might not be a huge deal for a corporate coder, but if you are an amateur website coder, the clean code requirement can be daunting. I know I have a hard time putting together error-free HTML most of the time, and I’m not totally schooled on what is “compliant” code and what isn’t. Luckily I have a great team of programmers and designers to do 99.99999% of the coding of InsureMe’s pages, but if you don’t have a corporate IT team behind you, there is still hope.

The Web Worker Daily blog has written up a good summary of three tools that can help you tidy up your code. They are:

1. HTML Tidy – This will find and clean up most HTML mistakes, and if it can’t fix them it will at least tell you where they are.
2. HTML Stripper – This works really well at cleaning up frames and scripts that are no longer necessary in your website.
3. Link Sleuth – This application will help you find any broken links on your website, so you aren’t sending people to dreaded 404 pages.

If you are looking to get better rankings on Yahoo! and you haven’t had someone check out the code on your site for cleanliness, set aside a chunk of time in the next couple days to check and correct your code. If could be the thing that takes your site from Yahoo! obscurity to Yahoo! success.

[Note: Download this stuff at your own risk - I have not tested these to see if they will completely melt down your computer once you install them. Just sayin'.]