Chiropractic Homepage

What I have decided to do is to take a web site and study it for elements that could be improved upon. we’ll probably get into a series of posts since there is a lot to cover. I’m going to take it step by step, so some things we cover may seem really basic to you. For the purpose of this post will be studying the web site (www.chiropractorwebsite.com). while it is an active web site, it does not yet appear in search results. We’ll be addressing some of those issues as we go.

Okay, let’s take a look at the home page.

I will clean up these images so that they are not taking up the whole page, but for now I’m just posting them so you can have an idea what I’m talking about.
While everything may look okay to begin with (nice photographs, clean layout, office phone number) there are some key elements we want to address.

For this screenshot I was using Firefox as a browser. It doesn’t matter if you’re using Internet Explorer or Firefox, you’ll still see what’s called a “title” at the top of each page. The title on a web site home page is critical, especially when it comes to search engines. The title of this particular page reads “Chiropractic for Los Angeles, Marina del Rey, Culv - Mozilla Firefox.” While that is not horrible, it could be more descriptive and the webmaster could be making better use of this tag.

Using Firefox, when you click on the right mouse button you’ll be given an option to “view page source.” I did just that on this page and snapped a screenshot, let’s take a look at the backend source code.

I may eventually go over each of these meta tags (title, description, keywords, author, etc.) in another post, for now we’re just looking at the tag highlighted in red, known as the title tag. Notice it reads just like the text we saw in the Firefox browser, on the top left corner.

Turns out that was more going on than just a simple title tag problem. I looked into the code of this web site and the tags are being created dynamically. While that is not a problem, the program creating the tags is cutting the text off at a certain length. That will have to be fixed or changed manually.

Okay back to our title tag. It should read “Chiropractic for Los Angeles, Marina del Rey, Culver City, and surrounding areas.” That’s a total of 81 characters in the title tag (including spaces) and it should fit fine and be viewable in both search engine results and at the top left corner of this chiropractor’s web site homepage.

If you visit the page now, you’ll see that the title tag reads as it does above. We may be changing the tag for search engine purposes and when we do I will address that in another post.

That’s it for today. Next will be getting into the other tags on the homepage, particularly the description tag and the keywords tag.

Have a Healthy Day!