SEO Isn't Just a Race, It's a Marathon

Starting the Santa Hustle at Cedar Point

Yesterday I donned some gloves, a heavy sweatshirt, and a santa hat as I prepared for the Santa Hustle half-marathon at Cedar Point. It was my third half-marathon, and since my first back in June I found that through training and perseverance I was able to shave over 25 minutes from my initial time. 

It'd be one thing to think that they're getting easier, but is running 13.1 miles ever really easy? In reality, the thing that changed was having more experience — especially knowing how to pace myself.

It got me thinking about how doing well-executed SEO is similar to doing a long run. Often in digital marketing there's a sense of immediacy, that once an update is made the results are quickly obvious. A problem that I find amongst many clients is that they perceive the same to occur with optimizing for search engines. 

Redirection Misdirection

Relaunching a site is often cause for celebration — you get to debut a fresh new design, plus (hopefully) give your users a better experience through improved navigation and functionality.

Common to many relaunches is the changing of URLs. Perhaps directory structures changed, or you transitioned from using underscores between words to Google's preferred dashes. What used to be:

www.mysite.com/attractions/outdoor/mini_golf.html

May now be:

www.mysite.com/outdoor-attractions/mini-golf/

So what happens when the new site launches and a user who tries to find something via a search engine ends up on an old URL?

The dreaded 404 Not Found error.

Be Dynamic!

Dynamically generated and interactive content is great — by creating HTML templates, we can extract information from databases to populate pages with customized copy, imagery and more.

In the majority of cases, content is accessed by modifying URL parameters. For instance, if I'm searching for pizza on Google Maps, this address would return results to me:

http://maps.google.com/?q=Pizza