SEO, Testing and that Disney ${bug}
This week on Twitter and Linkedin I've spotted several SEO's sharing the fact that the Disney+ website is showing incorrect titles and meta descriptions.
It appears that the dynamic variable template is being shown in the SERPs, rather than the actual page title.
While it has lead to a few memes and jokes in SEO circles this is a cursory reminder that SEO departments and external contractors must keep up to date with any changes that the product owner/manager and development teams are working on.
Agile development has been gaining in popularity in recent years, and for good reason. It allows for faster, more efficient project management.
In Agile, QA (quality assurance) is the responsibility of every member on the team. This means that developers and testers need to be in close communication with one another to ensure a successful project.
Agile development is usually test-centric, which means that tests drive the process.
With methods like TDD (test-driven development), developers write the code that will be verified by a test first. And before user stories (requirements) are set, both developers and testers should collaborate to make sure that tests are appropriate.
Once development and testing are underway, communication remains important. Agile testers should be testing as developers write code. Plus, developers will be carrying out tests too.
In Agile development, the "definition of done" is an agreement among team members that a user story has been finished according to pre-agreed standards.
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The criteria a user story must meet in order to be consider done are known as acceptance criteria. This includes any testing or validation that needs to take place.
In other words, once the user story meets all the set requirements, it can be considered done.
There are various methods of Agile testing methodology but your strategy should include:
For an SEO team this will mean that they need to ensure that their requirements are included within unit tests especially if there are dynamic elements involved within the creation of metadata.
While there are tools out there which can monitor changes to your website (such as Contentking) they should be used as a safety net and will only alert you once the errors are live in production and may even be indexed by the search engines.
Once your developers have pushed to production you will have to raise a new ticket and hope that you have a product owner that will prioritise a new user story to resolve the bugs in your next sprint.
So what user stories are in your product backlog and how can you make sure that that SEO considerations are included in unit tests?
