This is a very short post, which I also retweeted. Kristine Wirth posted a really concise blog post about “must do” Search Engine Optimization steps that website designers often overlook. The entire article is here (kristinewirth.com/prevent-website-crawl-errorsnowste), but, in her closing, she lists a few “don’t ever do this” no-nos which relate to meta tags (or H1 tags). For those of you that don’t know, meta tags are the descriptive phrases or keywords buried in the code of each page of your website. The viewer can’t see these but the crawlers that ultimately see and help determine search engine rank can. Kristine’s list of meta no-nos include:

• 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.

These are really basic issues which can be fixed quickly by someone with only limited coding or Dreamweaver knowledge. If you’d like us to do a quick assessment of your site’s search engine readiness, send me an email…