Learn/SEO-Mistakes-Even-Experienced-Web-Designers-Make
Revision as of 22:51, 3 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 decisions that pose real problems for search engines trying to index a site. There's so much detail involved in web design, it's easy to forget some of the nuances of optimizing a site for search.
A few issues are commonly overlooked - and the good news is, every one of them is easy to address. The articles listed below tackle these issues one by one, and show you how to identify, avoid and fix them.
For a start, you should take a look at how search engines see your site. The AboutUs Online Visibility Audit can help you here. It's a quick overview that shows you where your site is doing fine, where it needs improvements, and offers you guidance on how to fix known issues.
I'm one of about 20 people who answer questions for SEOmoz, which has a forum for its "pro" members. I've seen 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.