Using just any old website building tool for your pet sitting business may prove costly if the html code it uses to turn your design into a website is not search engine-friendly.

What do I mean by search engine-friendly?

When building a web page from scratch, for example, you have the luxury of including only the necessary code, keeping the behind-the-scenes jargon nice and clean (which the search engines love).

Strangely, some of the more popular web building tools add an exorbitant amount of code while ignoring some of the most important html tags needed to be search engine-friendly.

Not to worry… Here’s a Quick Self Test:

Visit your pet sitting business website and view the source code (On the top menu bar of most browser, click view > source/page source).

This should open up a text file with your html source code. The very first line should be a piece of code ‘Doctype’ and it should look similar in style to the example here:

The Doctype line is a necessary piece of code for browsers to properly interpret your code and assure that everything gets displayed to your visitors correctly.

You should also have the meta title and meta description tags. Sure, they are less important in search engine optimization these days, but still a good bet to include.

OK, without getting much more techy and geeky at this point, for the same price of free you may consider toying with some of these lesser know web building tools for your pet sitting business website.

5 Website Building Tools To Take For A Spin

1) Yola http://www.yola.com

Price: Free/$19.95 per year

They say it best:
Yola brings website building to the rest of us. Small businesses. Groups and organizations. Non-profits. Your Aunt Martha. The guy in the next cube. Everyone. Our website builder lets you easily take what’s in your head and turn it into webpages in front of your eyes. Yola lets you make great-looking sites with webages that work beautifully together. We do it without imposing banner ads or throwing up pop-up ad windows everywhere.

What makes it cool?
You can build as many sites as you wish with your one free account.

2) Doodlekit http://doodlekit.com/home

Price: Free/$14/$29/$49/$69 per month

They say it best:
We help you make your website a success with: blogs, forums, shopping carts, custom forms and much more. Our free website builder is ever-expanding, which means the longer you own your site, the more new features and functions you’ll discover.

What makes it cool?
Features include custom layouts and templates with built in stock photography, paypal button integration, form builder and SEO (search engine optimization) tools.

3) Weebly http://www.weebly.com

Price: Free

They say it best:
Content elements, such as videos, pictures, maps, and text are added to your website by simply dragging them from the Weebly bar to your webpage. We have a bunch of cool elements and add more all the time.

What makes it cool?
Time ranked them among the 50 Best Websites of 2007. Drag and Drop interface with a sleek and modern control panel. Plus, you can download and backup your website for safe keeping.

4) Webnode http://www.webnode.com/

Price: Free

They say it best:
By using Drag-and-Drop from the toolbar you can add new content such as polls, forums, articles, catalogues, widgets such as PayPal and much more. Webnode contains more than 40 beautiful templates or you can make your own. Webnode brings you powerful tools in Web 2.0 technology to administer your project.

What makes it cool?
Give your visitors the chance to store interesting pages of your website. Offer them social bookmarking. Webnode supports more than ten languages that you can build your website in.

5) Wix http://www.wix.com

Price: Free

They sat it best:
Wix.com is a Flash website builder, built to create a simple way for everybody to build and design Flash websites. Create a free website like a pro: Whether it’s business or personal, music or art. Wix’s Flash website builder is simple to use with a “drag and drop” builder and is the complete solution to publish & promote your Flash website like a pro.

What makes it cool?
With Wix, you have the ability to create a website utilzing Flash technology. With over half a million websites already created and hundreds of templates to work from, Wix looks pretty impressive if you wanted to go the Flash-based route.

So there you have it. If you get a chance to take any of these for a spin, send us a link to your site and a bit about your experience.