Pay Attention to Webmaster Tools HTML Improvements

Google Webmaster Tools features a section under Search Appearance called HTML Improvements.  As with anything else “Google”, they don’t tell you about things unless they are pretty important.  This section contains notifications about short and duplicate title and description tags.  This presents some pretty low-hanging fruit, but it can be very challenging to work through it all on larger sites.  I recommend you take some time and sort out as many issues as possible in this section of Webmaster Tools.  It certainly pays off!  Having all your issues resolved sends a clear message to Google: you operate a good site.  Your title tags are all unique and (hopefully) contextually relevant, you haven’t done mass automation to populate your tags, etc.  It shows that you have taken time, and your ranking will reflect it.

Below is a shot taken from Webmaster Tools for a client of ours with a pretty decent size site.  It took a long time to achieve, but we finally got a clean bill of health! (In this one area)

Perfect HTML Score in Google Webmaster Tools
It’s hard to get a perfect grade from Google, but worth working towards.