In the 90’s, when the first websites started to pop up on the web, nobody would have thought that things would get so complicated for the web development industry. Building was pretty easy and self explanatory then. Anybody who knew html and how to use frontpage could build and upload a website. I remember building my first website on geocities and I was so excited when I saw it indexed in Yahoo and Altavista in 1994. We did not have the big Google then.
Things have changed in the 21st century. Building just any website is no longer sufficient to bring traffic and create a buzz. Design and functionality needs to be in sync for any website to be successful no matter what industry it represents. Moreover, there’s a very important factor many webmasters miss nowadays, which is Search Engine Visibility .
When I look at the industry of web development, I see that very few companies and individuals have the knowledge and the necessary skills to create a website and bring valuable and targeted traffic to that site. The reason for this is mainly because there are too many factors involved in creating a website from owner demands, the way they see their own website and business, to functionality overriding the main gold of any website, which is visibility. A good example of this would be flash sites. We all know that flash sites are not visible by search engines however; it’s shocking every single time I hear a client ask for a flash site, basically because it looks pretty. Of course the suggestion almost always is NOT TO create a flash only site. We are used to offering a swoosh flash menu and the rest of the site as html. However, there are many different forms of this issue.
Imagine an ecommerce site with all the functionality in the world for the ordering process, but no conversion tracking, no custom URLs, no targeted Meta Tags and not enough content. It’s not shocking to hear the client ask, “Why aren’t we making millions a year in sales?”
In this kind of a situation, the first thing to look at would be current stats. (Of course if they have analytics installed, if not; to install it) How many visitors do they have, where are they coming from? How many orders? How much average sale? Then, we would have to analyze these stats and come to a conclusion. And the conclusion almost always is the same; installing custom modules on the website to enable custom Meta tags and static URL. This action will always fix the issue of an ecommerce site not being indexed on Google. Even though it is ignored by many webmasters, simple changes to Meta Tags and Page Titles can affect the ranking of a website tremendously. If you do not believe me, try it and submit a sitemap to Google and you will see the results within weeks.
July 8, 2008
