Posted by Julian
Posted on 06-11-2008 under Development, SEO

SEO is all about design, site architecture, development, market research, statistics and copy writing. Thats a lot to be all about, but what happens when SEO is missing one of those pieces? It becomes much more difficult to reach the target goal.

Sometimes on a job, you are forced to work in a platform that you are not familiar with. If you are working as the SEO on a project and its a site that you did not develop, be careful as it is easy to miss some major red flags.

Some important things to keep in mind when you are going to be working on a hostile server.

• Does the current site have working redirects? Some sites believe it or not, do not have a Re-direct or mod rewrite set up. If its PhP you should be able to use .htaccess to handle it, but if your in asp.net or .asp (god forbid) then good luck.
• Does the site handle 404s and 403s properly? This is a no brainer for us when we are developing a site, but it isn’t for everyone. Its not enough to see if the site send you to a 404 looking page, check to make sure the correct 404 header is being sent to the browser/spiders.
• Does the site have any cloaking. Be careful, although you did not set the site up, it has your name on it now. You don’t want to have any harmless cloaking bite you in the butt down the line.
• Is the site templated well? This can make a huge difference when making sweeping changes. If the site is based on Dreamweaver or another hard code template, sometimes it is easier to set up some php snippets on the server. (nothing like applying a template to 5000 pages) If the pages are in html you can sometimes tell the server to read html pages as php pages, allowing you to use includes.
• Register the site with Google Webmasters. This way you can see many of the errors that come up in The Googles scans.

Whats important to remember is that if you did not set up the site from scratch, you can’t expect it to have all of the “obvious” standards. Go into every job expecting the worst from the servers. That way you won’t miss anything.

Also if you are developing in a code language that is not your specialty, realize that you will be handy capped there. For instance we develop mainly in PHP, even though our most agressive SEO campaign is in ASP. Some of the things that we do as part of our campaign take a lot more work to set up as they are not as natural to us.

Although it is possible to SEO on a server/ that you didn’t have control over, it is more difficult.