As a search engine optimizer, you must understand that even the small and unnoticed parameters can kill your site’s rankings. This usually happens when development and SEO are considered different domains. They are, undoubtedly. However, they must be constructive to each other. SEO, just like web development involves complex factors. It’s not only get affected by Google updates, but site’s maintenance and upgrading will have its own consequences on its rankings
Why so?
There are certain accidental moves by developers that can take your SEO efforts down the drain. Here’s a few ways developers follow to the best of their site maintenance process, but could be destructive to the SEO process.
- URL Architecture:
URL restructuring could trouble your search engine optimization plan. The developer needs to be careful while working on the site as changing the URL architecture can make your site disappear from the search engines. This accidental alteration remains anonymous until you get a 404 error or identify it in the Google Search Console. Normally people think that low-cost seo plans cause trouble in the long run. But, the fact is that affordable SEO packages when executed like a pro brings great results provided the developers mistakes and black-hat practices set aside.
- HTML Sitemap
If a developer overlooks to update the HTML sitemap after changing the URLs of the web pages, it will harm the site’s efficiency in the search engines. HTML sitemap also contains the URLs that have been already blocked from the search engines. Therefore, it’s important to keep it up-to-date so that search engines can rank the site properly.
- PageSpeed Insights
Heavy websites usually show poor page-speed insights. This means the web pages take time for loading that eventually affects the overall performance of the website. This occurs when developers embed heavy images or incorporate additional features to the site. This impacts the insight score of the web page speed that’s lethal to seo efforts.
- Wrongly Placed GA Codes
The accurate placement of GA (Google Analytics) codes on a website is its head section. In case, a developer goes wrong with adding the GA tracking codes for any reason the search engines would fail to track site’s traffic and hence cannot rank it accurately. Wrongly placed GA codes lead to an erroneous tracking record of website traffic or get unidentifiable in any way.
NO data or inaccurate GA codes on web pages = NO or Poor Search Engine Rankings.
- Neglecting Event Tracking Codes:
If a developer forgets to keep the event tracking codes intact while upgrading the site, search engines would fail tracking the events. The search engine optimization process will suffer again because the missing tracking codes for site events will not fetch the targeted traffic. Poor traffic means poor SEO. If you want more traffic on your site, hire SEO Company Austin Tx to take pleasure in phenomenal services.
- Incorrect GA Codes on Mobile Site:
Desktop or mobile version, websites need GA tracking codes to give search engines significant data for better rankings. The erroneous GA codes of any type in any version of the site would bring you fallacious analytics. Misleading analytics would not bring you the desired SEO results.
Likewise, pixel and conversion codes should be placed accurately to keep the GA tracking accurate.
In a nutshell, developers are bound to upgrade the site without disturbing the SEO matrices, involving everything from sitemaps to tracking codes, meta tags, and URLs of web pages etc.
Developers should avoid these deadly missteps to keep the SEO efforts rocking.