Websites of companies often contain a Google Maps preview of their location(s) on the ‘Contact’ page. However, recently, I often saw that on many website, this preview did not show correctly. Instead, it showed a popup error message. This led me to investigate why this happens so often and how I could correct this error. Continue reading →
SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It means you you want to optimise your website, with the goal to make it search engine friendly. By making it search engine friendly, search engines such as Google and Bing can easily understand your website’s content and structure.
Posts with this tag will be about sitemaps, meta tags and server performance among other things.
Define social media profiles with schema.org markup
Google uses schema.org structured data to show information about a website on their search results pages. Needless to say, it is a good pratice from an SEO point of view to use schema.org microdata when possible. When performing a Google search for a brand name, you are often greeted with an information box on the right Continue reading →
Redirect if the URL does not match with .htaccess
This blogpost will briefly explain how you can redirect your website if the domain name does (not) match a certain word or words. For example: you want to redirect old.example.com to new.example.com and of course, because you take SEO into consideration, you want all of your pages to redirect from one domain to the other one Continue reading →
Creating a valid sitemap.xml file for SEO
A sitemap is a great way to show search engines a list of all the webpages on your domain. It’s a best practice for Search Engine Optimisation! I always suggest to use the Google Search Console dashboard to submit a sitemap to Google, and the Bing Webmaster Tools as well. By adding your sitemap to these Continue reading →
Correct schema.org breadcrumbs markup
Recently, I was looking for a valid schema.org markup for breadcrumbs. From my internet searches, I found many examples. However, most of these examples were not valid when I tested them with the Structured Data Testing Tool from the Google Developers website. Some errors I received included: The property title is not recognised by Google Continue reading →
Google Search Console – “Missing: Updated” WordPress fix
In Google Search Console under Search Appearance > Structured Data, I found many errors for my WordPress website. The errors were all the same, Missing: Updated. This means that for each WordPress blogpost or article, that page did not have the updated microdata. So to resolve this error message, I had to add the missing updated field Continue reading →
Web Exception Status: SecureChannelFailure
Web Exception Status: SecureChannelFailure Bing could not verify ownership of this site. See below for more details: XML URL https://thomas.vanhoutte.be/BingSiteAuth.xml Web Exception Status: SecureChannelFailure Meta Tag URL https://thomas.vanhoutte.be/ Web Exception Status: SecureChannelFailure It appears Bing Webmaster Tools can’t handle SSL connections that well… Web Exception Status: SecureChannelFailure was last modified: November 18th, 2014 by Thomas