3 Deadly SEO Mistakes For a New Site.
I know I’ve spoken before about SEO preparation when developing a new site but in the last week or so I’ve seen some massive but unfortunately common real world examples of SEO being jeopardised because of new web site development.
1. You only allow 48 hours for SEO review.
This is insane if you already have good rankings. Depending on the size of site, you need at least 30 – 40 work hours to review and prepare from an SEO perspective. Its like giving the electrician 48 hours before opening the new store to check all the wiring. This is not something you want to rush! Ideally you should have your SEO involved in the development process but unfortunately that rarely happens as a lot of developers say they make sites search engine friendly. What they don’t understand is what is causing the current site to rank. If they don’t understand it they can’t replicate it.
2. Your Developer has their own CMS
Some developers like to sell you their own Content Management Systems so they can charge you ongoing licensing fees and keep you locked in for updates and upgrades. I have not seen any custom CMS that does SEO well. For non ecommerce web sites we usually recommend WordPress as it handles SEO really well. One custom CMS we recently looked at did not allow changing of page titles, metatags, H1, link titles, alt tags and the list goes on. The site had a wonderful UX but underneath is was an SEO disaster waiting to happen. Talk about beauty only being skin deep Sheesh! Oh and of course we only had 48 hours to check it.
3. You push live on a Friday.. after 5pm
Could it get any worse? Are you mad? We have a wonderful client with a great business but last Friday they decided it was time to go live with their new site. We got an email at 4:45 that afternoon to say it was going live at 6pm. I didn’t see the email until 7pm. We’d done our SEO review of the site, had been involved along the way with the developer and the site was built in WordPress. So points one and two above had been avoided. What could possibly go wrong? As it turned out pretty much the worst things imaginable from an SEO perspective.
The reason you don’t push a new site live on a Friday is that there is no one around on the weekend to fix anything that may need fixing. In the above client’s situation the developer had made a terrible mistake when they pushed it live. It looked fine to the user but underneath the surface something disastrouswas taking place. The development web site was sitting on a staging server which is a common practice. We had made sure Google couldn’t index this server as we didn’t want the clients’ content duplicated in the index. The developers’ method of making the site live was to simply change the DNS records and point the live domain name at the staging server. Voila! New site live…. except there was a problem which I discovered a few minutes after 7pm that evening when I finally got to look at it. Every URL within the site was pointing at the old staging server address. The consequence of this was that the clients’ real website had disappeared from the Net. It now only had one page, which was the home page and everything else was sitting on another server. I rang around that evening and managed to get the developer to fix it. If I hadn’t by Monday the site would have disappeared from Google and possibly our clients’ business along with it.
Got any do’s or don’ts you’d like to share?
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
