I was recently asked a question about when is a website ready to publish, I think what was meant by the question, in part was, what is good practice and what is bad practice? So let’s cover what is bad practice first: -
- What you shouldn’t do is have pages published that say things like ‘under construction’ or ‘site being built’ and that have links going to them. That is bad practice and not recommended.
- Second you should make sure all your header information is completed and filled in on a page by page basis i.e. each page has it’s own relevant title, description and keywords. Also you set up your meta tags to convey a message to the search engines on how you want them to treat the page, ‘child friendly’ versus ‘adult’, ‘global indexing’ versus ‘nofollow,noindex’ etc.
- All pages should have a reasonable amount of relevant content and all links have to work, failure to do this will result in the site being marked down.
Basically bad practice is publishing and linking to clearly unfinished pages that have no real content and are high maintenance for the search engines because it is not clear what their content is and the intended audience.
