This week I have a quick workout for you. All you'll be needing is good old google search and its "site:" command.
Here's a quick way to check your page title and description:
- Pop over to your regional Google site (.co.uk in my case).
- In the search box type in (without quotes) "site:" followed by your website url. For this site it would be "site:www.friendlywebguy.co.uk"
- Click search
You will now see the pages that Google has indexed for your site, their page titles and descriptions. Have a quick read thru them to make sure they match up to what you would expect to see.
The issue with blog / CMS systems
In my case I've still got quite a bit of work to do! The page title for my home page is showing the tag line. In addition to that most of the category pages are also showing the same tag line. Lastly there are pages showing up that don't exist (?page=159).
Looks like I have some investigation work to sort that out.
To get you started on the 2012 resolutions I have put together a quick weekly check list for "Be Found", "Be Friendly" and "Be Current". Available in PDF format for easy printing.
Don't worry, they aren't time consuming. However there are a few one-off tasks which may take longer to do but no pain no gain!
More...
Disclaimer: I'll admit now that I am a fan of Google's offerings. They have loads of services for you to use on your website and nearly all of them are free. You get decent tools for the job - at a price that's right.
As a warm up exercise I'll introduce you to the Google tools we will need next year. More...