SEO! It used to be all you needed was a cleanly laid out website to get good placement in Google Search. No more. Now the site needs to be tailored for what Google wants to see.
- Gotta use HTTPS. Even if there is no reason to have a secure connection, and there certainly is no reason here, the Web is now geared toward commerce, and all must comply.
- Pages must be “mobile friendly.” At one time (when most of my web pages were written) HTML was used to specify primarily how contents were organized and the browser was tasked with laying everything out. For that reason, my web pages worked with Lynx, a text browser which did no graphics! But designers wanted control over the layout. Now everything has flipped. Mobile browsers had to display pages like they would appear on a large screen rather than reformatting them. So I’ve had to do considerable rewriting.
- Hints were needed to help Google. A file was needed to specify all the pages that needed to be crawled. Pages needed good description fields and the once-needed keyword fields are now ignored.
- While I was at it, I corrected links, deleted broken links, and fixed spelling errors.