Learn/SEO-Mistakes-Even-Experienced-Web-Designers-Make
Revision as of 19:35, 5 November 2010 by Aliza Earnshaw (talk | contribs)
By Michael Cottam on November 5, 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 structural, coding or design decisions that pose real problems for search engines. There's so much detail involved in website creation, sometimes a design decision that's great for users can have a big, unintended negative effect on your search rankings. It's a real loss to your business if your beautiful and very usable website doesn't get customers coming to it from the search engines.
If you launch a newly redesigned site that includes a critical SEO mistake, you'll probably know immediately, because your traffic will plummet. But if your site is brand new, or it's been essentially the same for some time, it's quite possible you could have one or more of the problems discussed in the articles below. If your site does have one of these SEO issues, there won't be anything very dramatic going on - your site simply won't rank as well as it could.
Go ahead - take a look through your site's visibility audit, read about these common SEO mistakes - and what to do about them - and make sure your site is fully visible to search engines.
- Multiple Subdomains: Creating subdomains such as blog.MyWebsite.com or store.MyWebsite.com can interfere with good search engine optimization, making it harder for a website to rank well in search results.
- Twin Home Pages: It's common for people to create two identical versions of their site's home page - one at MyWebsite.com and another at MyWebsite.com/index.php. This practice can make a site less visible to search engines, resulting in fewer visits from customers.
- Shared Page Titles: Every page of a website should have its own unique title that tells search engines - and people - what it's about.
- Link Juice: Save Every Drop: When you rewrite the URLs of your web pages as part of a site redesign, you could be breaking valuable links that send people to your site. Here's how to find and fix those links.
Read more about growing your business on the web.