Are you feeling a bit defeated by all the technical jargon and constant barrage of new rules affecting how your website ranks in search engines? The reality may be that trying to stay on top of ever-changing search algorithms used and insider secrets is probably not going to yield better results than focusing on a few proven website basics.
Whether you are designing a new site or doing a refresh of your current one, first make sure your content is relevant to your targets. Getting that right will likely place you well above other sites in your industry. Second, choose a website format that is responsive and easy to navigate on all devices – phones, tablets as well as desktop computers. And as you rethink your website plan, try to avoid these common SEO mistakes:
The glitz, the glam, the glorious design elements that make your website look like a million bucks … When contemplating a website redesign, it’s easy to focus only on those features that are appealing to the eye. But to ensure your new site will truly resonate with your target audience (and to save yourself from some major headaches down the road) you need SEO to be ingrained in your redesign strategy from the very beginning.
Think of it this way: you could spend all the money in the world on building a new, beautiful hotel with all the bells and whistles. But if no one knows how to find your hotel, you’ll never do any business.
Don’t build a hotel that no one can find! When planning out your redesign strategy, make sure to take discoverability and accessibility into account. (Not sure what that looks like from a practical, hands-on standpoint? Just keep reading!)
Before you bust out the wrecking ball and start demolishing your soon-to-be-forgotten site, make sure you take the time to examine it to determine what’s working and what isn’t. Here are some key metrics you may want to consider when auditing your site:
It’s a new era for SEO, an era where you can no longer keyword-stuff your way to search ranking success. Nowadays, if Google finds out that you are blatantly overusing (or hiding) keywords on your site, your credibility (and rankings) could take a serious hit. However, this doesn’t mean that keywords are totally irrelevant. In fact, if you’re doing what Google wants you to do (creating high-quality content), keywords will work their way naturally into your website’s pages.
A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect from one URL to another. Whether you’re switching domain names, restructuring your URLs (more on that in the next section), or consolidating content as part of your website redesign, setting up 301 redirects is crucial to ensuring any “SEO juice” from your old URLs gets transferred to your new URLs.
Here’s an example. Let’s say your current site has a “Team” page (at yoursite.com/team), as well as a “Culture” page (at yoursite.com/culture). However, as part of your website redesign, you want to consolidate the content from those two pages into a single “About Us” page (at yoursite.com/about). To transfer the SEO authority of those pages to your new page, you’ll want to set up 301 redirects so that yoursite.com/team and yoursite.com/culture both send folks to the new URL, yoursite.com/about.
Failure to set up 301 redirects for pages you move or delete can result in a drop in rankings as well as an influx in 404 (a.k.a. “Page Not Found”) error messages for your site’s visitors.
If your site is littered with lengthy, indecipherable URLs that don’t align well with the actual content of your site pages, restructuring your URLs should definitely be a priority during your next website redesign. Wondering where SEO comes into play here? While just like the searchers themselves, search engines prefer URLs that make it easy to understand what your page content is all about.
A general rule to follow when creating your new URLs: use dashes (-) between words instead of underscores (_). Google treats dashes as separators, which means it can return results when you search for a single word that appears in a URL and when you search for a group of words that appears in a URL. In contrast, Google treats underscores as connectors, which means it will only return results when you search for a group of connected words that appears in a URL. The bottom line: using dashes creates more opportunities for your pages to be discovered.
We all know that getting backlinks (a.k.a. inbound links) from trusted websites is a great way to give your website’s search rankings a boost. However, there’s also a dark side to backlinks.
If Google suspects that there are spammy, low-quality sites linking to your site, your rankings could suffer. This is known as “negative SEO”. (In some cases, spammers will purposely direct lots of low-quality links to your site in order to cause negative SEO.)
A website redesign presents the perfect opportunity for you to analyze your backlinks and remove the shady ones. If you use Google Webmaster Tools, you’ll see a “manual penalty” appear if Google detects one of these low-quality links. You’ll then have the option to make such links “no follows” so Google stops paying attention to them.
As Google’s preferred configuration for mobile-optimized websites, responsive design is your best option for delivering a great search and browsing experience to mobile users.
With responsive design, all of your website’s URLs are the same across all devices, and they all serve up the same HTML code. This isn’t the case with other mobile configurations, like setting up a separate, mobile-only site (which requires a different set of URLs) or implementing dynamic serving (which uses the same URLs but serves up different HTML).
With responsive design, the only thing that changes across devices is the styling (which is controlled by CSS). This configuration makes it easier for Google to crawl your pages and retrieve your content. To quote Google,
“This improvement in crawling efficiency can indirectly help Google index more of the site’s contents and keep it appropriately fresh.”
So there you are, ready to push the big green “LAUNCH” button on your newly designed website. The big moment comes and goes, and after hours of combing through the site, admiring its beauty, you stumble across something peculiar: your new, beautiful website isn’t showing up in Google’s search results!
Chances are that when your site was under construction, you had blocked the search engines from peaking under the hood until your site was 100% complete. When launching your website after a redesign, it’s important to double check that the search engines know where to find you.
How are you going to benchmark your redesigned website against your old website if you aren’t using analytics software? Answer: you aren’t!
As soon as your new website is released into the wild, wild web, you should be collecting data on its performance. Did your content audit and keyword research pay off? Is that new URL structure making it easier for visitors to navigate through your pages? You’ll never know if you aren’t monitoring key metrics with analytics software.
With the Hummingbird update of 2013, Google gained the ability to recognize full-sentence queries (in contrast to simply picking out the individual words that make up a query). As a result, search has become much more conversational.
Google doesn’t want to deliver you “results” anymore, they want to deliver answers. And the best answers don’t come from content farms, they come from websites that are crafted with their visitors -- human beings -- in mind.
Contact Heinzeroth Marketing Group to discuss how we can help you avoid these and other SEO mistakes.