As the world progresses into an e-centric mass, more and more businesses are recognizing the power of the internet as a gateway to success. Ancient companies stuck in their old ways are just now creating websites to rake in lost market share, and businesses with existing sites are making changes (e.g. adding blogs) to keep up with the social media boom. This is all good, fantastic, fabulous but the question remains: Do you want a website that gets lost on the web or a highly profitable online marketing tool?
Over the past year I have had more than 20 companies/individuals with newly created websites contact me for SEO advice and the sites were — sad to say — not making the cut. The clients had just dumped thousands (if not tens of thousands) into a new site, or re-design of a current site, but the web developers dropped the ball. I can’t blame them as web developers are not SEO experts, but that’s why hiring an SEO consultant is so important.
Please find a few of the changes we implemented for the above-mentioned clients below. I would outline all of them, but would have to kill you (no, jk). Though, there are some I can divulge…
- Keyword-rich footers to improve page content and the internal linking structure
- Dynamic content on the home page
- Properly structured pages (overall website structure)
- Meta content optimized for SEO (as basic as it gets)
- Interaction with social networks (e.g. Twitter feed on site)
Moral of the story: Get yo’ self a professional SEO consultant when building a website or making drastic changes to an existing site. Nowadays web designers realize the power of SEO and most are attempting to enter the industry and provide SEO services with little to no experience or results to backup their claims. If someone claims to be an expert, simply ask them to show you to the money — aka statistics. No stats, no go.
Until my next informative rant,
Aaron Schoenberger
The Brainchild Group
@BrainchildGroup