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How Web Designers Sabotage
Their Clients
By Kenneth Kowalsky
Article Date: 2003-06-20
One of the things that pains me the most as a search
engine marketing (SEM) professional is how so many business
owners are having their web site’s ability to attract targeted
visitors compromised by their own web development company.
You would think that any service that charges clients
thousands of dollars to design, build and host a business web
site would know enough about basic SEM as to not damage their
client site’s chances of generating search engine traffic.
Sadly, its usually after the damage has been done that the
client learns that the money they spent on their web site was
partly wasted due to lack of SEM smarts.
Having been in the business of getting web sites to rank well in
the search engines since 1995 as well as having worked with
countless webmasters, I’ve noticed three areas where web
developers consistently sabotage their client’s web sites
because they lack SEM savvy. These mistakes are:
MISTAKE #1: Improper or Incomplete Search Engine
Submission There used to be a time when all you had to do to add
a web site’s pages to a search engine was to submit the page’s
URLs (or web addresses) to said engine. Not anymore. These days,
its better with some search engines that you NOT submit a site
URL’s to it while with other engines require that you ONLY
submit the site’s homepage URL. Knowing which search engines you
should submit which web pages to and when will make a difference
not only in how fast it will be indexed (or added) by the engine
but also how high it will rank.
Still another way web developers practice improper search engine
submission is when they use automatic search engine submission
software to register a web site with the engines. The problem
with the use of this type of software is that it does not verify
the successful acceptance of a web site by the search engines.
Thus, many sites are rejected without the web developer ever
knowing so.
Rejected submissions, slower indexing times and lower rankings
all add up to less search engine referred visitors. Obviously,
the less of these types of visitors a web site gets the more
lost sales it will have.
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MISTAKE #2: Deleting All The Old Files When Redesigning
An Existing Web Site When a web site owner decides that its time
to get their site redesigned, it seems that the web development
company can hardly wait to delete the old design’s web page
files. This is especially true if the old design was done by a
different web developer. The problem here is that some of these
old web page files may still be generating web traffic from the
search engines, traffic that would be totally lost if these
files were deleted.
Instead of deleting old web page files, webmasters should use
their redesign as an opportunity to provide visitors with the
information they came for by taking their old files and either
updating the information, redirecting users to a specific page
with new information, or make it clear that the information may
be outdated and is for reference purposes only.
"If you have old pages that are indexed, don't remove them!”
says Robin Nobles, Director of Training for the Academy of Web
Specialists (http://AcademyWebSpecialists.com).
“Instead, create new pages based on high performance keywords,
and bring in additional traffic that way. You never know when
those old pages will make it to the top of the rankings, so it's
best to leave them alone and create new pages, always working
toward increasing your targeted traffic. Algorithms change
constantly, so a page that isn't doing well today may be on top
of the rankings tomorrow!"
MISTAKE #3: Web Site Design With Little, If Any, Thought
To ‘Search Engine Friendliness’ This third way many web
developers sabotage their client’s sites is a bit more
problematic than the first two because it involves the use of
legitimate web design techniques, some of which would make the
client’s web pages “unfriendly” to search engines.
By definition, search engine friendly web design is creating
one’s web pages so that they rank well in the search engines for
one or more keywords. This is accomplished by designing the
pages so that when the search engine “robots” or “spiders”
visit, they’ll find elements (i.e. headlines, body text, links,
etc.) that clearly tell it what that page is about and what
search terms (or keywords) it should rank well under.
The biggest problem that many web developers have with the
search engines, is that they fail to understand what the search
engines are going to do with each web page they have designed.
Because of this failure to understand the search engines, there
are many fantastically beautiful Web sites out there which will
never receive the exposure they deserve. It’s this “duality in
visitorship” (i.e. that web sites get two different types of
visitors; human/people and robotic/search engine) that is
overlooked by some web developers who don’t realize that Web
sites should be designed for both types of visitors.
The question now is “What web design techniques cause a Web site
to be search engine unfriendly”? While there are several design
elements that make it harder for a web page to rank well in the
search engines (some which I list on my Web site:
http://PromotionIsMyBusiness.com/weekstip.htm
Years
of experience have shown that most of these elements can be
overcome with savvy SEM techniques save one: lack of text on a
web site’s homepage.
Search engines consider a given Web site’s homepage to be its
most important, a starting point from which visitors can quickly
determine what the site is about and if it contains anything of
interest to them, the visitor. Whether its body, headline or
hyper, the more descriptive the homepage text is, the better
chance all its pages will have of ranking well.
The reason that its so important that there be some text on a
site’s homepage is that text is what the engines “see” when it
comes to evaluating how that page will appear in its index; not
cool graphics, flashy JavaScript, or even META tags. It’s a
common misconception that the World Wide Web is a visual medium,
but to the search engines, it’s all about words as pages are
indexed textually. Good web design should reflect this fact and
always take It into account or you risk making web pages that
aren’t “search engine friendly”.
“Don't lose site of the reason your client is building their Web
site”, says John Romano Jr. of Creative Web Inc. (http://CreateWeb.com).
“If its to attract new customers, then you'll need to design the
site in such a fashion that it will enable others to find it
quickly. We strive to design and implement a site that is not
only appealing in its presentation, but that is able to receive
the traffic our clients need to achieve success.”
IN CONCLUSION... The bottom line here is that with all the
competition for being positioned in the top 10 to 20 in the
search engines these days, its tough enough for one’s web pages
to rank well without having this process sabotaged by a
misinformed Web developer.
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