Tidy up your site’s addresses for search

Posted 29th April 2015 in Meta-data and Search

Google have made a few changes lately. The most recent change that’s in the pipeline is the way URLs (web addresses) are displayed in their search results.

In fact URLs aren’t going to appear at all: it’s going to look more like ‘breadcrumbs’. Like this Business name › About › Team, for example, rather than www.mygreatbusiness.com/about/team.

Unfortunately, Google needs some extra information to be coded into a website to get this right. Without this extra info, it’ll take a guess, which might not always be correct… To guarantee Google gets it right every time, you need to add ‘meta data’ to each page on your website. Have a quick read of my article about meta data if you’re not sure what it is.

How do I get the meta data onto my site?

If you want to guarantee Google gets it right every time, speak to your web designer and they’ll look into it for you. It’s not a big job, but is well worth doing to make sure your entry in the search results is as useful as possible.

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More resources

Here are a couple more resources for you to enjoy. If that’s not enough, have a look at the full list.

  1. Images as the first thing in a button or link

    If the text of an interactive element like a button or link is preceded with an accessible image, we’ve probably got an accessibility problem.

  2. Alt text for CSS generated content

    There’s an interesting feature in Safari 17.4 that allows content added with CSS to have ‘alt’ text. I’m not sure how I feel about this.