Thread: SEO Tip Of The Month

Whether you are a do it yourselfer or an SEO pro (like me!) there are times when you may want to tinker with a site to improve your SERP's on a KW or two. Sometimes making a few changes works out. Other times, especially if you are not familiar with some of the intracacies of SEO, it can have a negative cascading effect with other keywords and phrases on your site.

The challenge can be to undo the changes that you made that caused the negative results. Some people save multiple copies of the pages that they changed with a slight renaming of the original document name. This works fine, but it can cause confusion when you have hundreds of web pages and need to sort through pages to upload yo your site.

I have a better way that works well for me. I start a new file in MS Word to record my changes. The first entry, listed in bold, is the name of the file that I changed. Then I create a table with two columns. In the left column I list the original content or code of the section that I am working on. In the second column, I record the changes that I made. If there is more than one change on the page, I continue with a new row in my table.

If I change another page, I start with another section of bolded text and another table. When I have completed my changes, I save the document as the date (i.e. 05182005) that I made the changes. I usually save these in a sub directory off of the web root on my PC to keep the clutter out of my working web directory. This way I have progessive records of the changes that I have made. I can easily cross reference these files with the dates of when I checked my search engine rankings.

Keep track of every little change that you make to the site, whether you are simply bolding a few words of text or adding new pages to your site. With a little bit of studying afterward, you may notice a few trends that can help you in the future.