WEBSITE EVOLUTION
What is a functional website?
It seems like everyone is offering website development now - from overseas to high-end, from $50 to tens of thousands. And any of them may all be able to develop the look and feel your company wants, but the problem is that you may not be getting what you need. In fact, you may never know why you’re not ranking and not getting phone calls.
I understand that a lot of people start out with very little funds to put into their business so they want the cheapest route they can go and still get a website. That’s exactly why the Small Business Administration says that 95% of businesses ultimately fail.
Here’s the thing - you get exactly what you pay for when you use a free website platform. That’s not the intellectual part. The Free Website sites are too many to list, but I haven’t seen one yet that has any substance. All your doing is trading your information for their worthless tool.
Most don’t realize that what they do may actually hurt them on the search engines, but what can they do? Who can they trust to give them an inexpensive web site that will look good, serve them well over time, give them the ability to make changes to their own pages, work and play well with the search engines and bring in leads without spending a fortune on PPC?
Let’s take a step back - SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is made up of on-website and off-website factors, but we will only discuss the on-website in this article.
So why should you care if your website doesn’t have any SEO?
The first and most important reason is that getting your website to show up on the search engines is probably the one most important thing you can do for your business. 80% of all traffic comes from search engines.
Back to actually hurting yourself by having SEO done incorrectly - not being ranked is not the worst thing that can happen. It can actually get you banned - and once banned, it’s very hard to make it back on the search engines and it takes a very long time.
Keywords are the words people would use on the search engine (Google) to find you.
On-website SEO includes:
> Your keywords being on your page a certain amount of times, and in big, bold type (but only once in big and bold).
> Having your keywords in your domain name - you’d be surprised how many don’t.
> Every image needs a description with your keywords in it.
> These are some of the simpler things, but there are things that are more complicated (and take years and years to learn - not enough links to sites with your keywords, too many links on your pages, it goes on and on.
> Another thing SEO includes is canonicalization. It has to be taken into consideration when building your links from on page to another page on your website. It’s a very common mistake web site designers make.
Canonicalization is not really as complicated as it sounds. Matt Cutts from Google, explains:
Most people would consider these the same urls:
- www.example.com
- example.com/
- www.example.com/index.html
- example.com/home.asp
But technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set.
Q: So how do I make sure that Google picks the url that I want?
A: One thing that helps is to pick the url that you want and use that url consistently across your entire site. For example, don’t make half of your links go to https://example.com/ and the other half go to https://www.example.com/ . Instead, pick the url you prefer and always use that format for your internal links.
So, you ask yourself, why would I create a website or pay someone to do it that doesn’t know SEO?
That’s the intellectual part I was alluding to earlier.
You shouldn’t.
But SEO experts are not necessarily designers and you need a good website designer to set up your site - to start with. It has to look good after all. But you need an SEO expert to come behind them and do their job as well.
Even though my company does provide great looking websites with built-in SEO for a very reasonable price, my personal websites are not that great as far as design - I’ve had people tell me that - lots of people.
But do I care? No, I don’t because they look OK and my sites come up on the search engines when people look for the services I provide. And they convert.
There are many more things that are important on a website - like clearly explaining your “difference”, testimonials, and making it easy to reach you immediately or schedule an appointment. Having nice, pretty pictures that flash across the page doesn’t hurt either.
Videos are the next step up - and YouTube videos can get you ranked higher on Google (since Google now owns YouTube).
Oh - and since we’re talking about a functional website, let’s keep it that way and add a security expert to follow the SEO expert. Getting sites hacked is common, easy and I fixed 3 (THREE) of them last week. Good luck if you didn’t know to sign up for backups at your hosting company. I wish you even more luck when you get their first level customer service representative who barely speaks English. This is why we provide our own hosting.
You should continue your education by reading these 2 articles:
3 Mistakes that 99% of All Websites Have
SEO vs PPC - What Every Entrepreneur Should Know
They are entertaining as well.
I’m very active on the forums helping people with these concepts. Please feel free to ask and you shall receive (if reasonable and applicable).
I appreciate all the Thank You cards - but it’s really not necessary. I like helping out where I can.
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You can read some of Dawn's other LinkedIn PULSE posts:
- Niche Selection and Keyword Research for Entrepreneurs
- The Perfect Web Site – Does it Exist?
- SEO vs PPC – What every Entrepreneur should know!
- Two Easy Ways to Exponentially Increase Profits
- Are you Failing at MLM? There is HELP!
- All Social Media is NOT Created Equal!
- Take your Hobby to a Business
- The Big Secret (to Success) is not a Secret at all!
- Gain 50% More Revenue - Update your Database
- Do It Yourself "Touch" Marketing for Entrepreneurs
- 5 Basic Internet Marketing Ideas for Entrepreneurs
- 10 New Tools for your Internet Marketing Arsenal
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