A lot of site owners would consider themselves fairly able to handle the technical details of their site. While not all site owners personally code their pages, you can’t run a website for very long without getting to know a thing or two about HTML coding.

The trouble is, the things you need to know for basic site maintenance and the things you need to know for SEO are completely different. While most webmasters get by through slapping quick code band aids over major disasters, search engine optimization demands utterly clean, functional code.

The majority of sites that get into trouble over code fall into the trap of using bad reroutes and error messages. Sometimes, they even do this thinking that it’s good for their SEO. For example, as most SEO experts would recommend the use of a 301 redirect instead of a temporary redirect, site owners tend to use them to try to salvage the ranking of old pages. As the old pages might not be relevant, however, the site ends up suffering instead of benefiting.

Another common error with code in association with search engine optimization is the use of custom 404 error pages. These pages are seen by some as SEO tools, but over-customization can result in the mistaken indexing of the pages.

Even if you think you’ve got a handle on your site’s technical details, it’s a very good idea to consult an optimization professional about your code. You can talk to us at www.SEOConsult.com about how code affects your SEO.