Be Careful When You Edit Your Website
Website Design May 05, 2011
Be Careful When You Edit Your Website
I had a client who had been updating its website for nearly a year. They added over 100 pages of content and new web pages to enrich their website and their Google search engine results. They called my web development company to ask why Google was only showing 30 of their web pages instead of 131 pages.
Description meta tag was being interpreted as a snippet of code
Our analysis revealed that a keyboard character they entered in their description meta tag was being interpreted as a snippet of code, blocking all these new pages from being seen in Google. As a result of this error, they lost nearly a year of Google crawl time for all these new pages.
What you type and what you see displayed in a web browser can look fine, but when done incorrectly, it can create significant problems in your website’s HTML code.
It doesn’t matter if you’re using a CMS, Content Management System, or a fancy website editor. Only a coding professional knows if the code and characters are technically correct, so they don’t cause your website any harm or difficulty with search engines.
What you don’t know about SEO can hurt you.
When I edit content for websites for my website maintenance clients, I quickly review a page for the following elements: proper use of H1 through H4 tags, bolding, link formatting, correct ALT tagging, and well-formed metadata. When I create a new webpage, my checklist also includes proper navigation linking and padding of the latest stage link into the site index.
If you are editing your website pages and are unfamiliar with any of the items above, you may be sabotaging your hard work.
Web grammar and good writing are just as essential.
Did you know that Google can detect your website’s reading level? They can determine if your site is suitable for readers at the Child, Teen, Adult, College, Master’s, and Doctoral levels. You cannot see this detection, but loosely defined, it is the sum of information found on your website compared to tens of thousands of similar websites and directories with traffic or visits factored in.
It means that Google might consider your website a more authoritative source for information on a particular search query due to its grammar and writing.