dotsno
New Member
I usually start the week by annoying myself finding websites of web design companies that claim to be search engine optimisation (SEO) experts and then checking out their client sites. I really hate to see people who have been tempted into buying professional services from firms that really don't know what they're doing well enough: this is usually just because people don't arm themselves with some basic knowledge beforehand. Please please do: before you spend money on web services, find out from someone else (who's not providing those services!) what the basics are.. web forums like SBF can be really good for helping you to get some impartial advice for free.
If you have had your site "SEO'd" by someone, please as an initial thing just go and check two really simple things. To an SEO expert, this will be the most basic boring dull simple stuff but if *this* is wrong, chances are you've got other bigger problems that your SEO firm should have sorted out! There is absolutely no reason on the planet that you would have this knowledge if you're not an SEO bod and haven't attended a workshop or read forums/books about it, or done some other training, so don't be embarrassed if you haven't checked or if you've got it wrong.. you can't be expected to know this stuff already.
HOW TO CHECK YOUR SITE'S TITLES
Let's just do it: take your domain name and stick "site:" before it - type that into Google, eg search Google for:
site:mydomainnamehere.com
No spaces, no quotes around it. You'll see all the pages from your site that Google has indexed. The titles that appear above each entry, underlined, are what you can control. You can control other bits too, but let's start with that as the page title is pretty important.
If they are all exactly the same you are missing out big time.
Can you imagine going into a book shop and trying to find the book you want if every single one had the same title on the outside? No, that's dumb, right? So if your SEO company has done that to your website then get a refund.
If they have your brand name in the title and nothing else, or the only bit that changes is one little word on the end like "Home" or "Products" or something equally meaningless, that's a sin too: these titles should be understandable by people and should describe what is on the *page* in some decent detail, not be the same across the whole site.
Remember, if you're doing SEO yourself, to optimise on a page-by-page basis. Think very carefully about the title of the individual page. A bit of training in SEO could well save you a lot of money by understanding yourself how it works - even if you then get a professional to do it, which can save a lot of time. You will then at least be armed with the knowledge of what to check for to make sure you've got a good job.
E-COMMERCE SITES THAT MINIMISE YOUR PROFITS
The second thing which frustrates me on a Monday morning is web companies that say they know about e-commerce and so give clients a standard off-the-shelf e-commerce engine that is not SEO'd - so you end up with loads of product and catalogue pages all with the same title and with loads of question marks and "productID=39" type stuff in the web address of the page. Again, you're missing out, make your web addresses human-friendly too.
I know this not because of some theory but because I've got a site where all the URLs looked like blah.com/member.cgi?who=58&page=photos&no=4 - hundreds of the pages were indexed by Google... but as soon as I then changed all these into pages like blah.com/ben/photos.html Google loved the site even more and *within days* that number of pages indexed had shot up and it now has 20,000 pages indexed. You'll see a vast improvement very quickly if you just do this one thing.
IN RETAIL?
I prefer to use the concept of "OREO" - and not just because they're cookies and yummy - that's Online Retail Engine Optimisation. SEO is all well and good, but a lot of web design firms know a bit about SEO but nothing about retail or coding e-commerce systems. You end up with lots of site visitors and a few sales, or what may seem like a lot of sales, but imagine how great it would be if you could sell ten times more really easily. You can, if your retail process is optimised and running smoothly. Off-the-shelf packages that plug into your website can seem to work very well, but if they're not SEO'd properly - and particularly if the entire retail engine isn't optimised precisely for your products, your target market and your sales philosophies, you won't be getting the most you could from your website.
And please, if you do SEO stuff, don't tell your clients you know what you're doing unless you really do
Thanks!
If you have had your site "SEO'd" by someone, please as an initial thing just go and check two really simple things. To an SEO expert, this will be the most basic boring dull simple stuff but if *this* is wrong, chances are you've got other bigger problems that your SEO firm should have sorted out! There is absolutely no reason on the planet that you would have this knowledge if you're not an SEO bod and haven't attended a workshop or read forums/books about it, or done some other training, so don't be embarrassed if you haven't checked or if you've got it wrong.. you can't be expected to know this stuff already.
HOW TO CHECK YOUR SITE'S TITLES
Let's just do it: take your domain name and stick "site:" before it - type that into Google, eg search Google for:
site:mydomainnamehere.com
No spaces, no quotes around it. You'll see all the pages from your site that Google has indexed. The titles that appear above each entry, underlined, are what you can control. You can control other bits too, but let's start with that as the page title is pretty important.
If they are all exactly the same you are missing out big time.
Can you imagine going into a book shop and trying to find the book you want if every single one had the same title on the outside? No, that's dumb, right? So if your SEO company has done that to your website then get a refund.
If they have your brand name in the title and nothing else, or the only bit that changes is one little word on the end like "Home" or "Products" or something equally meaningless, that's a sin too: these titles should be understandable by people and should describe what is on the *page* in some decent detail, not be the same across the whole site.
Remember, if you're doing SEO yourself, to optimise on a page-by-page basis. Think very carefully about the title of the individual page. A bit of training in SEO could well save you a lot of money by understanding yourself how it works - even if you then get a professional to do it, which can save a lot of time. You will then at least be armed with the knowledge of what to check for to make sure you've got a good job.
E-COMMERCE SITES THAT MINIMISE YOUR PROFITS
The second thing which frustrates me on a Monday morning is web companies that say they know about e-commerce and so give clients a standard off-the-shelf e-commerce engine that is not SEO'd - so you end up with loads of product and catalogue pages all with the same title and with loads of question marks and "productID=39" type stuff in the web address of the page. Again, you're missing out, make your web addresses human-friendly too.
I know this not because of some theory but because I've got a site where all the URLs looked like blah.com/member.cgi?who=58&page=photos&no=4 - hundreds of the pages were indexed by Google... but as soon as I then changed all these into pages like blah.com/ben/photos.html Google loved the site even more and *within days* that number of pages indexed had shot up and it now has 20,000 pages indexed. You'll see a vast improvement very quickly if you just do this one thing.
IN RETAIL?
I prefer to use the concept of "OREO" - and not just because they're cookies and yummy - that's Online Retail Engine Optimisation. SEO is all well and good, but a lot of web design firms know a bit about SEO but nothing about retail or coding e-commerce systems. You end up with lots of site visitors and a few sales, or what may seem like a lot of sales, but imagine how great it would be if you could sell ten times more really easily. You can, if your retail process is optimised and running smoothly. Off-the-shelf packages that plug into your website can seem to work very well, but if they're not SEO'd properly - and particularly if the entire retail engine isn't optimised precisely for your products, your target market and your sales philosophies, you won't be getting the most you could from your website.
And please, if you do SEO stuff, don't tell your clients you know what you're doing unless you really do
Thanks!
Business Web Design
