- Leaving older versions of your web pages on the server
The search engines send programs to review your website. A program thinks that ‘aboutus.html’, ‘aboutus-old.html’, and ‘aboutus-save.html’ are 3 different files. This looks like duplicate content and can cause your website to descend in the search engine ranks. (Learn more about duplicate content and SEO.) Ask your web developer how they are archiving your pages. Confirm with them that the obsoleted (and previous versions of your) Web pages are on a local machine and not at your website nor at a development, staging, or test website. - Maintaining your own website after SEO work
I am seeing this more and more during these difficult economic times and want to highlight how damaging this is to your SEO efforts. Let’s say that last year, you had SEO work done by a professional. This year, money is tight so you want an employee to maintain your website. Now you have a non-SEO-trained person updating your website. Due to their inexperience, they will inadvertently unravel the complex connections your SEO professional put into place last year, and gains that were achieved after the SEO project will begin to disappear.One option is to send the employee to SEO training. With that you end up spending the money you intended to save. Plus, SEO standards are constantly changing, so you will need to continue sending that employee to training – and now the employee is truly distracted from his/her core competency.Set yourself up for success! An SEO professional knows what the search engines are looking for. They work more efficiently, and, in the end, will cost you less.