WebDev

Do you write on your website a series of frequently asked questions (FAQs) and try to answer them? Do you know that putting text on a website is not enough to gain traction? Even if your questions and answers are unique and could be desired by users, they may never find their audience.

Playing with the SEO aspect may help, but if we concentrate only on the surface – visible part, we will still be missing out. What is important is what beneath, just in the background. This is how we can simply describe what is Schema.

Structured data (Schema) is presented on a website in a way that is not visible to an ordinary visitor but processed, when found, by search engines.

Schema is very important and will be even more this year (2023), as mentioned directly by many people at Google.

To get your question-answers into search engines you should put your interest into the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) Schema.

Here is how I did this on some of the websites that I made with Hugo.

Through the “interesting” days, when people started migrating into Mastodon, I found quite interesting toot from one of its users where he mention adding Mastodon discoverability for any domain using WebFinger Protocol.

I have been quite interested in how to implement this on my end, as I prefer people to discover me with my long-standing email address, rather than the newly created username on the selected mastodon server.

As my website is hosted on Netlify I decided to check if I can implement this. Here is how it goes.

As you are aware, when you create your post with images and publish them on your website, sooner or later they will appear on Google.

Your article will land in Search Results and images will be shown in Google Images.

Sometimes you are taking a lot of effort into your images and restricting their use by providing specific disclaimers or copyright information on your website.

The problem is that Google does not always know that and when you search for an image, that is sourced from your website, the image may be copyright restricted.

The user, who is searching through, will not know that as well and he may come into trouble. This may result in a fine that may need to be paid to the rightful owner.

When Google is releasing their search engine updates, there is always a lot of action and a lot of discussions around. Everybody is looking for the impact of the update on their website and position in search engines.

By the end of August 2022, Google comes with a Helpful Content Update (HCU). This highly appreciated (by content creators) update suppose to penalise low-content websites and those generated by AI. I have been happy about it and knew, that none of my websites will be affected, and I was right!

On websites that I tend to create, I always try to utilise Structured Data (Schema) as much as possible. This invisible for ordinary visitor data is served in the background and is used by search engines and other websites for better positioning of your content.

On YummyRecipes.uk I have already widely implemented Schema for Recipes but would like to do some more.

If you read my other post, you will find out that I recently rediscovered Progressive Web Apps (PWA).

Following this lead, I decided to implement it on the websites, where our main audience browses it from mobile phones. Later I decided to implement it gradually on all of my websites, independently of whether the main audience is on mobile or desktop. As you will see, PWA is quite useful for desktop users as well.

If you are not a first time on my website you already know, that I like simplifying things and using a minimal approach with a complex solution. Overall, if something complex can be done that same, but simple, why not try?

This time I want to cover Favicon during website design.

“A favicon is a browser icon that represents a brand or website. Most often seen next to a web page’s title in browser tabs, favicons can also be found in address bars, bookmark lists, search results pages, toolbars, browser history, and other places across the web.”

What is a favicon? @ blog.hubspot.com

I don’t want to reinvent the wheel, as there is already a perfect solution for that, well written and documented by Andrey Sitnik from Evil Martian.

Over the last years, I forget about something called Progressive Web Apps (PWA) until one day I added to my Home Screen a bookmark to Homebridge, and, believe me, or not, I do not add bookmarks that way very often.

When I added this bookmark to my Home Screen on iOS I noticed, that it looks unusual. The icon was like a native app. When I click on the icon it didn’t open inside Safari like other bookmarks but it run on full screen like a normal native app.

Of course, it was still Safari in the background but highly limited to the scope of that single website, that it feels like a native. It certainly can be confused with an app.

It’s not very often that I am finding something new in a tool that I am using constantly, every single day. Unless it’s announced as a new feature, I would not expect to find something, that is like a holy grail!

From time to time I see and look at some SEO articles to see what others are writing about and what’s new that I need to look at.

I have started reading an article about some SEO mistakes to avoid, and the first thing that stopped me from reading further was a point about “Read more” links.

It was stated that the severity of using the “read more” link for SEO is high and that the developer of the site should remove the use of “read more” links in favour of article links (for example title as a link).

That particular author claimed that when that has been done, the site visibility “went through the roof”.

Partly I can agree with that, but removing “read more” links shall not be advised if it is done right. Here is why.