Content or markup reduces the appeal of a page in search-engine results

Article
10/10/2017

These rules identify content or markup that search engines can analyze only partially.

Suboptimal content overview

Suboptimal content is content or code that would improve search engine rankings but falls outside of normal search-engine analysis because of the size of the content or its placement in the page. The page ranking is not necessarily reduced by suboptimal content, but the page might rank higher if the content were optimized.

The Microsoft Expression Web SEO Checker evaluates your site using a subset of known search-engine behavior patterns.

Suboptimal-content problems

The Expression Web SEO Checker detects and reports the following conditions.

The <title> tag contents are too long

Search engines may ignore content after the first 65 characters in a <title> tag.

For more information, see WEB1047 - The <title> tag contents are too long.

The description for the page is missing.

Because search engines typically display the content of the <meta name="description"> tag in search results, each page should have a single, unique description that accurately reflects the contents of the page.

For more information, see WEB1027 - The description for the page is missing.

The <meta name="description"> tag contents are too short

If there are fewer than 25 characters in the <meta name="description"> tag, search engines may consider it to have less relevance than a longer description. If the <meta name="description"> tag is empty, search engines may consider it to have no relevance at all.

For more information, see WEB1024 - The <meta name="description"> tag contents are too short.

The <meta name="description"> tag should be declared only once in a page

If there is more than one <meta name="description"> tag in the <head> tag section of a page, a search engine may arbitrarily decide which one is the most relevant in the search-engine results. This reduces the relevance of the page for a keyword search and lowers the search-engine ranking of the page.

For more information, see WEB1026 - The <meta name="description"> tag should be declared only once in a page.