The first thing I would like to say is that I am not an expert in website design, and I am not an expert in Search Engine Optimization. The second thing I would like to say, is that neither are many people who claim to be.

Over the past year I have made so many mistakes with my own website, many of which I only learned about and corrected recently. And the site is still far from perfect. When starting out, I visited forums all over the internet - forums on web design, on SEO, on small businesses, and forums on the pitfalls facing startups.

What I’ve learned from these forums is that a HUGE proportion of the ‘web experts‘ who offer advice are anything but. They don’t know that much more than you or I. Sure, they can offer yes-or-no answers to basic HTML questions, or tell you why Wordpress is better than Blogger, regurgitating the same old discussions you’ve already read twenty times elsewhere.

Anyone can claim to be an expert or a professional when it comes to SEO. Search Engine Optimization is a new field, and without being an expert yourself, it’s difficult to know who’s talking crap and who’s actually speaking the truth.

So before you decide to listen to an expert you meet on a forum; before you pay them money to ‘redesign‘ your website and get you listed in pole position on Google, or, God forbid, ‘submit‘ your site to search engines - take my advice and pay a simple, brief visit to THEIR website.

I’ve drawn up a small checklist of my own that I use to filter the posers from the real thing. It’s by no means comprehensive but I’ve based it on my own experiences and the mistakes that I’ve made. You would be amazed how many SEO ‘experts’ fail many or all of these tests.

1. Redirects and .htaccess.
http://www.yoursite.com and http://yoursite.com are NOT the same thing. Both URLs will open your home page, but as far as Google is concerned they are two completely different addresses. What this means is that if you have 100 incoming links to your www address and a further 100 links to your non-www address, your web-site does NOT have 200 incoming links, you have two web-sites with 100 links each.

Adding a few simple lines to your htaccess file fixes this problem. All it involves is deciding which of the two addresses you are going to use, and redirecting the other so that it ‘becomes’ the first. Typing in http://yoursite.com will then automatically change to http://www.yoursite.com, making it almost impossible for anyone to link to your alternate URL.

This is critical! The number of incoming links plays a huge role in how your site is ranked by Google. If your expert’s website fails this simple test, don’t even bother looking further.

The same applies to having multiple addresses pointing to one web-site. The last company I worked for changed its domain name a few years ago from a .uk to a .com address. But they never redirected one to the other. Even now, five or six years later, visitors still arrive via different URLs, and ‘dilute’ the site’s links.

I hate to use a tired old phrase here, but this is not rocket science - it’s pretty basic stuff. This Wikipedia article outlines the simple steps required to adjust your htaccess file to handle redirections of this kind.

2. Page Not Found Messages.
We’ve all seen them. You mistype a URL or the page you’re attempting to access has been renamed or taken down. What you get instead is a plain text “Not Found” message, or even worse, a page full of Google ads provided ‘for your enjoyment‘ by the web-site’s host company.

So you say ’screw this’, hit the back button and go somewhere else.

Every web-site should have a customized 404 error page, designed to point your visitor in the right direction and prevent him from leaving. Building one is even simpler than handling redirects. At its most basic level, all it involves is adding a single line to your htaccess file:

“ErrorDocument 404 /notfound.html“

and creating a notfound page. On your expert’s site, try opening http://www.thesite.com/fred-flintstone.html and see what happens.

3. Contact Info and unreadable email addresses
If you are running a commercial web-site of any description, you need to make it as simple as possible for customers or potential customers to contact you. This is what email addresses are for, and this is what contact forms are for.

The key point I wish to make here is that a HUGE proportion of users do not use desktop software such as Outlook or Outlook Express for sending and receiving email. They use web based email providers such as Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail. If your site has an email link as its primary method of contact, and worse still, if the link is something obvious such as “email me” or an image of a postbox, you are making it extremely difficult for these users to contact you.

Clicking on these links immediately launches the desktop email program - which for many people is not even configured. If the link does not contain the email address as plain, readable text, these same users have no address to type into Hotmail, and no easy way to contact you.

So, does your web expert have a clearly readable email address, or a fancy image on their contact page? Do they have a contact form, making copying and typing their email address unnecessary? And is the contact form of a reasonable size, or so small you’d be lucky to type 10 words before scrolling becomes necessary?

4. Overlapping content and changing font sizes
I use a 1600X1200 monitor and Firefox as my browser of choice. I sit well back from the screen and like to increase the font size when I visit web pages with a lot of text. In Firefox, this is simply a case of using the Ctrl and + keys a couple of times. In Internet Explorer, raising the ‘Text Size’ option to Largest (View Menu) has a similar effect.

About 30% of the web-sites I visit have major problems when I do this. Often, paragraphs of text merge into each other - making both unreadable - or cross over unseen boundaries into images or tables.

Not everyone uses a large monitor, but there ARE a lot of people out there who have difficulty reading small font sizes. These are the same people who switch their Windows machines to use Large Fonts, and the VERY people who choose to increase the font size in their web browsers.

So pick a page on your expert’s web-site - preferably one with a lot going on (text, images, etc.) - and hit that Ctrl and + key combination in Firefox a couple of times. If everything is still readable, fine - if not, well… you know what I’m talking about.

5. Email addresses and spam
We all hate that spam, and the last thing we want to be doing in the weeks after our web-site goes live is browsing through emails hawking Viagra and porn sites, searching for the one genuine correspondence from a potential, paying customer.

This WILL happen if your email address is visible to robots trawling your site. Fortunately, hiding your email addresses from the spam machines is very, very easy. It’s simply a case of using a little Javascript to insert the address only when the page is opened in a web browser.

To see if your expert makes similar attempts to combat spam, you need to take a quick look at the source code for the web page. This is very straight forward and you don’t need to have any knowledge or understanding of HTML or scripting languages.

Open the contact page where the email addresses are located. In Firefox, use the Ctrl+U shortcut to see the source, and then simply search (Ctrl+F) for “mailto”. If you find it, and if it’s followed by an email address, you know this person LOVES the spam, and if you use them, you’ll have the opportunity to grow to love it too.

This is a very useful check to see if your expert has any real knowledge beyond a basic HTML book or tutorial.

6. Lesser SEO and usability issues…
Frames. Does the site use frames? The easiest way to check this is to click on a link on the home page. If the URL remains unchanged, then the site is probably using frames. This means visitors will have great difficulty linking to any page other than the home page, and Google will have problems indexing and linking to the site’s content.

I had assumed that frames went out with stone washed denim, but recent investigation proved me wrong. No doubt your expert will come up with a good reason why in this particular case it makes sense to use frames, but pay no attention. If readers cannot link to your content, or send the link to their friends, you might as well not have a web-site.

Gif Headers. Does the site use gifs (images) as headers? And are these images full of keywords? This is a common, fatal mistake, and if you find it on ANY site touched by an expert, treat them as if they are mentally deranged and back away slowly. Your keywords are your life blood, and if Google can’t read them, you’re on a short path to failure.

ALT Tags. Using Internet Explorer, hover your mouse over an image, any image. Does a little pop-up appear with a few words describing the image? If not, then you know the site designer has squandered an opportunity to introduce those valuable key words to the search engines YET AGAIN. I should come clean at this point and own up to being lazy now and then myself when it comes to Alt tags.

None of these minor items are deal breakers in themselves, but they should raise serious red flags about the ‘expert‘ status of the designer.

Remember, an expert is supposed to BE an expert. You may not understand how redirects, javascript, or ALT tags work, or how important they are for your web-site, but THEY are supposed to. That’s what being an expert means.

On a forum I visited recently, one of the moderators was a web-site designer and self-professed SEO expert. She answered questions on how to build web-sites, and on what the most important elements were in achieving a high Google ranking. The site visitors loved her, and many had used her to build their own sites - for a fee of course.

Her advice was just plain bad. The web-sites she created were equally bad. And her own site was shameful, failing almost all of the tests outlined above. But she came across as a ‘nice’, friendly woman, prepared to hold the hands of the technically illiterate. The forum in question was small and full of these sorts of people - ripe for the picking.

Check out the credentials of the person giving you advice before you take it or them seriously. And I should say, in conclusion, what I said at the beginning of this post - that I am NOT an expert.