If not, chances are any gains you have made from your SEO plan will be toast with your next big (or small) release.
If you are regularly updating your site and you don’t have someone reviewing the changes before you release them, you are playing Russian Roulette with your business.
For more see:
#1 Search Engine Ranking Factor: SEO QA
Dev Server Indexed = SEO Death
Robots.txt File Disallowing Entire Site = SEO Death
How To Redesign Your Website & Not Screw Up Your SEO
8 Response Comments
I have seen this myself on a number of occasions, when searching for a web site I liked but forgot to bookmark. Instead of it being on the first page of Google, it’s buried a few pages down.
The sad thing is, the changes that often cause the site to disappear from popular view are ones that make it look and feel nicer for the end user, like slick flash or animations.
Harry,
No reason why you can’t do slick flash or animations and SEO at the same time.
True, it’s not the technology that causes the problem but the diligence of the designers in checking the site after the changes.
I’m sure those designers had seen plenty of sites that made similar changes who didn’t lose position and never realized the additional work that went into maintaining that ranking.
Spot-on Andrew….I’m always amazed when asked to be an “SEO doctor” for a new client to discover that they were ‘wide open’ to the web with both test servers, production servers AND that their past SEO firm had obviously never even heard of a robots file…
…sigh…course, that’s what keeps our doors open…but at the same time wouldn’t ya think that a simple search for SEO best practices would work for them too?
🙂
Jim
Jim,
In my experience it’s the maintenance of SEO that is the most difficult part. There are so many other things that an organization needs to focus on and if the people at the top don’t get SEO then they usually don’t prioritize it as a key part of the process until they’ve been burned several times. And I should know because it happened to me.
I think of SEO much like losing weight. You want to achieve a goal, but it can’t be done over night. You need to continuously work on your SEO making sure it is up to date in order to achieve that goal. It is not a one shot, one time deal.
If only Jillian Michaels were a SEO consultant. We’d all have more traffic and look fantastic at the same time.
Yah SEO maintainance is a part of my SEO strategy. I think its an on going process which can not be static. I keep on researching SEO factors.