Prevent Website Crawl Errors…Now

Posted by kristinewirth on August 21

I once heard it stated that “…website designers keep SEO’s in business.”  And while that might irritate a few web designers most of the time when it comes to getting a website indexed, ranked and visited, it’s the design of the website itself that can be the culprit.

So how do you know if the firm you hired has done “all the right things” on your site so that when the search engines come to pay a visit, they’ll happily run through your field of flowers like a little girl on a warm spring day?

• Check your mark-up code.  You can check your code for free online by visiting the W3C Markup Validation service.  There are a lot of “best practices” stated by W3C and as mentioned here, suggested by Bing.  Without listing them all, which will make your head spin, just visit (or better yet, have your website designer visit)http://www.w3schools.com/.There’s been some debate on whether or not Google takes proper code into account  but…one website did do a very small test on four of its pages and found that Google tended to prefer the page with the proper mark up code.My advice?  Especially if you’re using XHTML is to be absolutely 100% compliant.  HTML seems to have a little bit more wiggle room.  But…even with that said, it’s better to be safe than sorry and just be sure your code is up to standards.
• Bad Links.  ”Bad” links aren’t just links to bad neighborhoods, they’re also those broken links that you have *gasp!* within your own website or from your website that point out to external sites.  Now, you obviously can’t control whenever someone else moves or gets rid of one of their web pages but you most certainly can find out which links on your site are broken both internally and externally.I suggest using a free program called Xenu’s link sleuth.  This will do a check on all the links on your site to see which ones encountered errors.  Depending upon how large your site is, you may want to run this at least once a week.Other “bad” link problems are…
  • missing page elements – for example, images aren’t loading properly on a page.  This is why it’s so important to usecanonicalization(video) when linking up anything on your site.
  • Don’t use scripts for internal site navigation.  Instead just use anchor tags with keywords as the anchor text.

Other coding errors that can create issues (as stated by Bing) are:

• Missing, empty or duplicate title tags.  (Note the duplicate title tags especially).  What Bing is saying is that you should not use the same title on more than one of your site’s pages (sage advice).
• Missing, empty or duplicate meta description tags.
• Missing, empty or duplicate H1 tags.

Additionally, according to Bing, if you use a 302 redirect on any of your web pages note that it DOES NOT pass link juice.  Proper SEO dictates the use of 301 (permanent) redirects.

You can read Bing’s coding guide here.

This post is an excerpt from Bonehead Bits – The SEO Newsletter.  To get your copy before the public does (for free), click here now and get signed up.