I can understand the thought process. A company holds a meeting and it’s decided that they want/need a website. They shop around, gather bids and ultimately write a huge check to some firm or somebody for a state-of-the-art website with so many bells and whistles that it would make Cpt. Kirk envious. This company has just wasted thousands of dollars and many months. Fast-forward a year – no one is blowing the whistles and the bells are silent. Why? The wrong plan.
Remember the meeting? The decision was “we want/need a website”. They should have said our CUSTOMERS want it. Ok, another meeting, time to hire a consultant, an seo – someone like me.
Now the decision makers have learned that the glitter and gizmos they paid heftily for only satisfied themselves and ultimately annoyed the visitors – worse even, annoyed the search engines.
Now the consultant instructs or the hands-on seo they hire cleans up the mess. He removes 80 lines of crummy content-less roll-over javascript code (oh people sure love those menus!) and puts it in an external file, same is done with the style code (after all your customers aren’t searching for Arial or Font-size: 12!) and adds footer navigation so the crawlers can finally discover the site beyond the home page. The seo will re-write the copy to actually INCLUDE your keywords and writes unique headers for each page. (The title of “Welcome to Front Page” doesn’t really fit your market, does it?) Also he’ll work on link development with RELEVANT and authority domains and he knows to stay away from the email seo buzz.
6 months later the work is paying off. This is a year and a half AFTER the decision at the initial meeting I told you about.
How much time, how much money has been wasted? Don’t look it up if you’ve been through this, you’ll cry. I know of several Denver area businesses that went through this – with me.
Do it right from the beginning, build a site for your customers, a site friendly to search engines and save your money. Save your time – possibly your business.
Excellent Points Knox! More Denver businesses need to read this!