Learn/SEO-Mistakes-Even-Experienced-Web-Designers-Make
Revision as of 22:38, 3 November 2010 by Aliza Earnshaw (talk | contribs)
Even really good web designers make implementation decisions that are real problems for the search engines. There's so much to web design that it's easy to be unaware of some of the nuances of SEO. Here, I'm listing the most commonly overlooked problems -- and the good news is that every one of them is easy to address.
In my work with SEOmoz, I'm one of about 20 people who answer questions from SEOmoz's PRO members in their Q&A forum. This has given me exposure to an interesting and diverse range of SEO issues, ranging from figuring out why a competitor's site ranks slightly better than the member's site, to utter catastrophe where the member's site disappears completely from the index. And typically these members' sites are well-designed, with nice navigation, great user experience, and rich content. From my experience with these Q&A questions, plus my own SEO consulting work, I've come up with my "Top 10" list of classic SEO mistakes that even good web designers make.
In general, the kinds of mistakes in my list don't have obvious symptoms. It's more a matter of not ranking as well as you might if you HADN'T made the mistake. If you made the mistake as part of a site redesign, and all of a sudden your traffic and rankings dropped dramatically, then you'd know something was wrong. But most of the time, there's no sudden change--you've just NEVER ranked as well as you should have. It's like you bought a manual transmission car, and never realized there was any gear but 1st.