Why Mistakes Matter

January 26, 2011
by James Lowery

We’re currently hiring for a new SEO Executive to join our Warrington team, and as a result, my senior team and I have spent a lot of time in the last few weeks sifting through CVs to try and find the right person. Of the fifty or so applications that we had, about half got filed under /b/ for bin.

Attention to Detail: You're doing it wrong!

The problem with leaving clumsy mistakes in your CV is that it undermines any credibility that you have – especially when you cite attention to detail as a key skill.

Is this relevant to SEO?

We’re seeing increasing evidence across our campaigns that Google is taking website errors more seriously as part of their ranking algorithms. Broken links, invalid code, chained redirects, inconsistent 404 handling, and http errors are all reported as part of the Google Webmaster Tools interface, and are something that all webmasters should be taking seriously.

These should be your best kept secret.

It’s all very well to have a cool 404 page like the one Blippy put up, but in an ideal world, you don’t actually want to have it served your users.

This makes sense. A lot of the changes that Google have made to their ranking algorithms over the past couple of years have been about improving user experience – they have promoted site speed as a key indicator, and there has been plenty of coverage about big brands getting a ranking boost.

When a website has a lot of errors, it can have a profound impact on user trust. Would you feel comfortable putting your money in a bank if their home page was filled with errors? No, of course not.

What You Can Do

We all know mistakes do happen putting the wrong URL in a link from a blog post is an easy thing to do but it is really important to keep on top of things. Google’s Webmaster Tools console has plenty of information about how your site is perceived, but it’s also possible to get information from running regular health checks of your site using a crawler like the one at Audit My PC.

Here at Latitude, we’re also working hard to help support our clients in keeping their sites in the best of health. As part of every SEO campaign we undertake, we run regular reports over more than 50 different technical indicators to try and handle errors before they become problems.

If you’re interested in working with us, and letting us get involved in improving your site for users as well as search engines, then get in touch.

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