Learn/SEO-Mistakes-Even-Experienced-Web-Designers-Make
Revision as of 17:20, 4 November 2010 by Aliza Earnshaw (talk | contribs)
By Michael Cottam on November 4, 2010
Michael Cottam is an independent SEO consultant in Portland, Oregon, and an associate at SEOmoz in Seattle, Washington. Michael co-founded TheBigDay honeymoon travel and registry company in 2001, and was responsible for the website and SEO for that company. He's on the board of SEMpdx and manages sponsorships for SEMpdx events, including the annual SearchFest conference.
Even really good web designers can make strucural, coding or design decisions that pose real problems for search engines. There's so much detail involved in web design, sometimes a design decision can result in unintentionally blocking search engine crawlers from part of a site. It's a real loss to your business if some of those pages are the ones that generate revenue or leads for you.
I've outlined a few very commonly overlooked issues in the articles listed below. The good news is, every one of them is easy to address.
As one of about 20 people who answer questions in the forum at SEOmoz, a site offering tools and tutorials for search marketing professionals. I've seen an interesting and diverse range of issues come up among the SEO professionals who are forum members. Typically these members' sites are well-designed, with nice navigation, great user experience, and rich content. But even these professionally created sites turn out to include one or more of the classic SEO mistakes that a good web designer can make.
It's easy to spot an error when something dramatic happens, like a sudden drop in traffic to the site or search rankings. When a site simply doesn't rank as well as it might, that can mean an SEO mistake is lurking somewhere within it.
The mistakes explained in the articles below don't have glaringly obvious symptoms - that's why a company can easily miss them when it launches a new or redesigned site. Take a look through your site's visibility audit, read about these common mistakes, and make sure your site is fully visible to search engines.