SEO Mistakes You Can Avoid
It’s one thing to assume that you know you are doing when it comes to SEO and it’s another thing to actual know in reality.
As a partial interest, I visit a lot of resources online and read up on SEO. Allot of blogs talk about the importance of title title tags and meta tags, how to create internal links in a website properly, best practices and so fourth.
So, I reckoned, I wanted to implement a few tactics for fun and started trying out stuff with our businesses web site.
My first notion was what does a computer nerd know? that I don’t know, right. Our website is a very popular site in our neck of the woods; we have a dependable base of online business and were looking for ways to improve our natural search engine traffic.
This is where things took a turn for the worst.
The difference between theory and application is vast; we figured we would apply some of the
SEO tips we read about on implementing 301 redirects using the .htaccess file.
Just so you know,if anyone reading this get an inclination to to implement changes on their own, heed the warning of someone who made that mistake, just don’t.
Turns out in our attempts to execute the mod rewrite, we bungled the syntax so some of our most valuable pages redirect loop from the non canonical version of our site and ended up losing some of our pages in Google.
Supposedly this happens when there is more than one variant of a page as a result of duplicate content issues and the search engine eliminates deletes the other variation.
In either case, we messed up the redirect real bad an it ended up costing us time, energy and traffic from our excursion into unchartered SEO territory.
Luckily, we were able to locate a few respectable SEO companies who helped us fix the issue and showed us the proper way to carry out things, in the event that we wanted to tinker again.
Another thing we discovered was the importance of protocol, like backing up your work, not changing too many variables and once and how to chart progress with a process map to keep your code in order.
If, or when something breaks, you need to know how to recover it to how it was or implement some type of temporal fix until you can insure a long-term solution.
the takeaway here is, what you learn online can be informative and engaging, but, there is a reason why people are experts in their field.
So, before you simply dismiss something like SEO and roll up your sleeves with the do it yourself attitude, be aware for every action, there is an equal of greater reaction.
In this instance, it was our website splitting itself up so, be careful with the .htaccess file and leave it in the hands of professional developers , so you can concentrate on your own business instead.
