Proofing for Problems: SEO and Web Development

You’ve read all the SEO blogs out there, including this one. You’ve tried, tested, tweaked and torque your site and search marketing efforts to the best possible calibrations. You’re confident that your site is as tight as it can be, and your marketing efforts will soon pay off.

But…

It’s hard for a business owner to just sit back and wait. As much as we dream about being paid for doing nothing, and as much as those pictures of people relaxing on the beach with a beer and a laptop appeal to us, we know that isn’t reality. No… reality is more like Murphy’s Law. Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.

Instead of waiting and chewing your fingernails down to the quick, start proofing for problems in your SEO efforts. Here’s a brief list of things you can look for and do something about your web development before they get in the way:

That Darn Robots.txt File

Many a website owner has blown the first month or so of an SEO campaign because of a simple mistake in the robots.txt file of their site. Two lines can really jack up a campaign:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

The first line says, “Hey, all you robots, search engine spiders, crawlers, whatever…” The second line says, “Don’t visit any pages on this site.” Generally, these lines are placed in the robots.txt by a webmaster who forgets to take them out after a design/redesign.

Proofing this problem: The robots.txt file can be found in the main directory of your website. You can view it with any browser, simply by typing in the URL http://mysite.com/robots.txt (or http://www.mysite.com/robots.txt, depending on your settings). If your site is supposed to be visible to search engines, make sure the “disallow” line isn’t in your file.

Canonical URLs – To W3 or Not?

View your site structure as Google sees it. You can do this by typing “site:mysite.com” or “site:www.mysite.com”. Scroll down your personal SERPs, looking at the URLs. What you’re looking for is a www.mysite.com and a mysite.com version. You don’t want both. If you’re seeing both versions, you have an issue with your canonical URLs. There’s a penalty for this, but it’s self-imposed.

You see, all the links, ranking and so on you accumulate to your site is finite. You have a limited amount. –And, although you see www and non-www versions as the same site, search engines don’t. This means that your SEO efforts become split between two versions.

Proofing this problem: If you find both versions, you’ll need to update your .htaccess file with a 301 redirect, again found in the main directory of your site. Add the following lines to go from non-www to www:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

You want to replace “mysite” with your actual URL. You can also set up a Google Webmaster account and specify which version you prefer Google to index.

Proper Content Structure

Would you put a roof on your house without first building the walls? Of course not.  A house is built in certain order, and so is a piece of content. Not only does it help your readers, in that proper content structure provides an easy-to-read piece, but it also help search engines digest your pages better.

Proofing this problem:  Look over your content and make sure you have proper page structure. For example, a #1 heading (<h1></h1>) should never come after a #2 heading or be left off entirely. Make use of normal document structures for stronger pages.

Duplicate Duplication

Duplicate content doesn’t bring site penalties; after all, if it did, you’d be in trouble any time someone scraped your site. However, it does lessen the overall quality of your site, whether it’s duplicate content or copied meta information.

Proofing this problem: If you have a Google Webmaster Tools account, you can go in and see what suggestions it has for your meta information. Otherwise, look over your meta tags and titles to make sure they’re unique to the page they’re on. If not, rewrite them!

Key Term Much?

Just because you can use a key term on your page, doesn’t mean you should. Too many key terms can be as bad as too many uses of the same term. If you’ve poured a lot of key terms into the same page, you might want to rethink that strategy.

Key terms should be considered topics. Main topics, sub topics, even tertiary topics, but no more. Really, how many topics can one page be about?

Proofing this problem:  Go through your pages; after all, you have nothing better to do than chew your nails, right? Ask yourself what three things the page is about. What’s the main topic? How many topics can it reasonably be broken in to? If you can find five or six topics, it may be better to tighten it up to two or three and create another page with the other two or three. The more tightly focused a page is, the better it will be received!

Proofing for Problems Isn’t for Wusses

It takes a little time and a lot of attention to detail to proof your SEO campaign, especially once you’ve already started implementing things. In fact, the often-meticulous nature of optimization is one of the reasons businesses hire a professional SEO experts in the first place. However, by taking the time to tighten up your site and campaign from point to point, you’ll also be increasing the possibility of high returns from any marketing campaign you set your mind and resources to.