The takeaway:
If you are copying and pasting content from Microsoft Word into your website, use this FREE text cleaner (below) to clean your text. (takes seconds)

Clean Miscrosoft Word Text Before Pasting into Website image

Why is this important?
Because copying and pasting directly from MS Word can leave nasty little characters that:
1) Look freaky to your viewers
2) Prevent Google from giving you great results

Although I wrote about cleaning your text a while back I continue to notice that many folks are struggling with having weird characters appear in their websites due to Microsoft formatting madness. (not to mention that in the background Google is prevented from seeing your content) So I’m posting our TEXT CLEANER directly in this article:


This text cleaner will clean the following nasty characters when copying and pasting from a Microsoft® Word document, into your website:

“Double Quotes” | ‘Single quotes’ | Ellipsis … | em-dash — | trademark ™ | registration trademark ®

Paste in original MS Word Text:

Copy this clean text and paste into your website

For those folks who are using WordPress to publish content, there's already an awesome plain text converter built right in. Here's a post illustrating how to use WordPress' Paste as Plain Text Function

Do you need other characters added to the cleaner? Just ask below in the comments and we’ll make it happen. Check out other resources on the Daveworks site