Credit: Joakim_kna
Fear of The Dark
Are you afraid to implement the SEO techniques you've spent hours learning because you fear you may lose your existing rankings? God forbid your SERPs get knocked to the next page, but you can prevent such an event by taking some simple SEO leaps of faith 🙂
Low Risk, Low Return
This adage holds particularly true for any financial investment, and your investment of time and money in SEO should be no different. Playing safe will only work for so long, and inevitably you'll find the need to innovate on your SEO game plan. I'm not suggesting a major overhaul or drastic change that confuses those smarty spiders from Google, but rather a phased approach of changes that will lead to better results in the long term.
Credit: Addicted Eyes
4 Key Things to Optimize
There's a couple of things the best of us are afraid to change for CMS's, Blogs, and Static Websites:
- Dynamic URL's - Dynamic content is both ugly to look at and difficult for search engines to interpret. Implementing SEF (Search Engine Friendly) url's will go a long way in gaining better SERPs, and doing so is not overly difficult, although it does take quite the leap of faith. A key consideration is to do so early on while building content for one's website, so that there are less retroactive changes for the spiders to follow.
- File Naming Convention - Yes, this is very important for client sites - especially because 'hero1.jpg' or 'index1.html' doesn't mean much to a search engine. For webmasters, this advice is best applied when choosing post slugs for blog post titles, or when uploading images in a hurry (I've been guilty of this on multiple occasions)
- Dynamic Meta Generators - If you're using a CMS with a fairly large base of content, you might want to use a plugin or extension to dynamically inject meta data into the webpage based on page titles, repeated phrases, and categories.
- 301 Redirects - Possibly the most dubious reason for webmasters and seo's hesitating from 'doing the right thing'. Note that your rankings will dip temporarily if redirects are put into effect, but will improve considerably in the long run.
Credit: Csitcentre
I'm sure there's more to add to this list, but I purposely left it incomplete for you to add to it in the comments. What SEO changes have you been meaning to do, but are yet to implement? What's holding you back? -- Dev