How Well Does Your Site Stack Up?

When I’m not working on my own client projects I work for a marketing agency as their SEO consultant and spend a lot of time providing clients with a report on how their web site stacks up. I look for good design structure, well coded HTML and CSS, duplicate content issues, navigation implementation and so many other factors that it would take too long to list them all.

I’ve looked at so many sites, more than I can remember and the majority of sites are very poorly constructed. Even the so called leading design firms around Sydney have some pretty ordinary coding standards however there are some that do create some well constructed sites too so it’s not all doom and gloom.

From an SEO perspective however I would say that 95% of sites need lots of work to even have a hope inthe search engine rankings. Web sites that were developed a couple of years ago often don’t stack up but that is to be expected since the technology and web standards have changed and are now much better.

My concern is that I still see so many brand new sites that have just launched and the site structual design is just not going to do them any favours at all for SEO. On many of these occassions the business owner doesn’t know this as they only know how it looks visually but can’t possibly understand what’s happening behind the scenes. It’s pretty sad when you have to tell a client who has just spent $$$ on a new website that significant parts of the site need to be redesigned and coded if they want any chance in the rankings.

With so much competition in the web design market it’s not hard for a business to end up with a less than perfect web site that is not going to perform other than looking pretty. My recommendation is get a firm that provides both SEO and web design services under the one roof and get them to explain why what they do works. Get them to show you some of their previous performance results in standards compliance and search engine rankings. If you want to be certain then get a second opinion from a reputable design firm as well.
Until next time…