One of the most basic points to keep in mind while working on your website is to keep it simple. A lesser repeated, but just as important lesson is to always backup your work. No matter how basic or simple your steps may be, you should always keep a backup before you push your changes live. It’s a simple mistake to not keep a backup of your original site or content before getting to work on it, one which can cost you more work if you’re not careful. Even seasoned coders make mistakes, and when they happen, a blog for example *cough*, can be offline until a backup can be restored.

But enough about completely crashing a website or losing content and materials, there are small errors you can make which can actually hamper your site as well which aren’t as immediately obvious. If you’ve been rewriting your simple tags, say your title, description and keywords (yes I know, the internet says they don’t really matter anymore), and you happen to mix them up with the wrong content, you could experience a negative impact in your rankings. And even a loss of a single position in the search results can equate to lost conversions. Another common error, one which doesn’t directly impact your rankings and website performance and is a tad more difficult to detect, is mis-tagging elements on your pages. It may seem a small, and innocuous step to miss in a website or page, but every little thing does add up. And when it comes to optimization and your online competition, every little bit helps.