SEO Is Not for Beginners
As a hobby, I read a lot of SEO resources online and read up on SEO. They talk about the importance of title title tags and meta tags, how to link keywords in a website properly, implement best practices and things of this nature. Let’s just say thinking you know and actually knowing are two different things. Out of curiosity, I decided to tinker on my own, just for kicks and started experimenting with our businesses web site.
My first thought was what does an SEO guy know? that I don’t know, right. Our site is a very hot site in our industry; we have a stable foundation of visitors and were investigating ways to ramp up our natural search engine traffic.
This is where things took a turn for the worst.
The distinction between theory and practical application is vast; we figured we would apply a few of the things we discovered on implementing redirects using the .htaccess file.
Just so you know,if anyone reading this get an inclination to to implement changes on their own, heed the warning of someone who made that same assumption, just don’t.
Turns out in an attempt to execute a mod rewrite, we fumbled the syntax and as a result most valuable pages redirect loop from the http side and ended up losing some of our pages in Google.
Supposedly this happens when more than one variant of a page as a result of duplicate content issues and the search engine just chooses one over the other.
In either case, we mishandled the redirect poorly which ended up costing us time, energy and traffic from our excursion into unchartered territory.
Luckily, we were able to locate a respectable SEO company who helped us fix the issue and showed us the proper way to execute things, in the event that we wanted to muck around again.
Another thing we discovered was the importance of protocol, making backups, not changing too many elements and once and how to create a process map to keep things in order.
If, or when something fails, you need to know how to recover it to how it was or create some type of work-around until you can determine a long-term solution.
The moral behind the story is, what you learn online can be informative and engaging, but, there is a reason why people are experts in their field.
So, before you simply dismiss something like SEO and dawn your wrenches with the DIY attitude, be aware for every action, there is an equal of greater reaction.
In this instance, it was our site splitting itself up so, be careful with the .htaccess file and its best left to real SEO’s , so you can concentrate on your own business instead.
