Don’t keep restructuring
Try to make sure your site design is good before you get too far into the
process. Sites that are constantly being restructured have numerous prob-
lems, including the following:
Links from other Web sites into yours get broken, which is bad for
potential visitors as well as for search engines (or, more precisely, bad
for your position in the search engines because they won’t be able to
reach your site through the broken links).
Anyone who has bookmarked your page now has a broken bookmark.
It’s a good idea to create a custom 404 error page, which is displayed in your
browser if the server is unable to find a page you’ve requested. (Ask your
Web server administrator how to do this; the process varies among servers.)
Create an error page with links to other areas of the site, perhaps even a
sitemap, so that if visitors and searchbots can’t find the right page, at least
they’ll be able to reach some page on your site.
Editing and checking spelling
Check your pages for spilling and editng errors. Not only do error-free pages
make your site appear more professional, they ensure that your valuable key-
words are not wasted. If potential visitors are searching for rodent racing, for
example, you don’t want the term rodint racing in your Web pages. (Except,
that is, if you are trying to catch traffic from oft-misspelled keywords, some-
thing I discuss in Chapter 5.)
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Part I: Search Engine Basics
