Could your site be mistaken by Google as a “junk” or spam site? Make sure your website displays these signs of quality to maximize exposure and boost your website ranking.

Tip #1 to improve ranking of a website: Adhere to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the organization that oversees the standards for the internet and internet coding. Having code that meets W3C standards is considered to be a “sign of quality.” It is thought that having signs of quality on a website can help with rankings in the search engines. Therefore having fewer W3C validation errors means that your site could gain a higher Google website ranking.

To help meet W3C standards, follow best practices, such as formatting your site with CSS rather than HTML tables, avoiding using deprecated (outdated) code, and so forth.

Tip #2 to improve ranking of a website: Add a robots.txt file to the root domain

A robots.txt is a plain text file that tells the search engines where they are not allowed to go on a site. Having a robots.txt file, even a blank one, is considered to be a sign of quality. It shows that you acknowledge that search engines are allowed on your site and that they may have free access to it. Learn how to add a robots.txt file to your site.

Tip #3 to improve ranking of a website: Correct 404 errors on the site

This may seem like a small thing, but 404 errors (broken links or pages not found) do reflect upon the quality of the site, which has some bearing on website ranking. Correcting 404 errors shows that your site is up to date and is being maintained. We recommend that you routinely review the site for these errors and correct them whenever possible.

Tip #4 to improve ranking of a website: Create a search engine sitemap.xml file

Search engines love site maps, as they help them index sites more completely and efficiently. Having a standard site map page is a must, but you also want to have a site map written specifically for the search engines: a sitemap.xml file. This file contains every URL on your site and should be submitted to your Google Webmaster Tools account to increase your Google website ranking. Check out sites such as XML-Sitemaps.com to create your free sitemap.xml file.