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How Web Designers Are Sabotaging
Their Clients
Three Mistakes Web Developers Make When Designing
Websites
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 rands 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 1997 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 NUMBER 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.
MISTAKE NUMBER 2
Deleting All The Old Files When Redesigning An Existing
Website
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. "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 NUMBER 3
Web Site Design With Little 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 (ie. 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, 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 text is on the homepage text, the better
chance all its pages will have of ranking well.
The reason that it's 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, fancy
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", "If it's 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."
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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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