4 Common But Not-So-Visible SEO Mistakes

The following guest post is from Nicole White from Web Design Schools Guide.

If you own a website, you know that SEO is an inherent part of the design process, a very important part that determines your position in the search engine rankings and one that can make or break your success on the Internet.


photo credit: Sarah G…

Everyone knows that keywords are important when you’re thinking SEO, but most people are not aware that SEO is much more than just interspersing your text with the right keywords. If your site is not doing as well as you expected it to, perhaps you’ve been guilty of one or more of these SEO sins, mistakes that could be the reason you’re not getting as much traffic as you would like:

• SEO not being a part of your plan: As far as SEO is concerned, it must be a part of your initial plan, rather than an afterthought, when you’re adding the text portions of your website.

  If you include optimization for a search engine as part of your entire process, you’ll probably bring in someone who is an expert to tell you what you need to do in order to push your rankings higher. Make sure you stay in tune with what your SEO expert is doing so that your design processes are not disconnected from each other.

• Maintenance taking your site out of contention: Not many of us realize this, but if your site is down when you’re performing maintenance work (as you must do sometimes), you risk being taken off the search engine rankings if a search engine spider comes looking your way when there’s a blank page at your regular URL.

  In order to avoid this situation and its consequences, set up a mirror site where users are redirected when you’re down for maintenance.

Note from Steve: Search engines do understand that problems happen on sites and servers. Every site goes down at times whether for maintenance or an issue with the site hosting. You shouldn’t lose ranking for a temporary downtime, however if your site remains down for days or weeks, search engines might conclude your site no longer exists.

• Content not being updated in a while: No matter how popular your site is, if you neglect it for a while, it is going to climb down the ranking ladder sooner than you realize.

  You must update it regularly, with content that is of quality and that helps keep you in the spotlight. If you do not have time to devote for regular updates, outsource the operation.

• Finishing with SEO: No matter how much time you devote to SEO, it is a never-ending process, one that must be performed continuously and constantly. This is because the Internet is a medium that changes at a rapid pace, and unless you are able to keep up, you are definitely going to be left out.

Nicole White writes about online web design school. She welcomes your feedback at Nicole.White222 [at] gmail.com

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