Category: Search friendly websites

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How important is an SEO-friendly website for your business?

Business owner are realizing how important their website is in producing leads. Our clients have found that a significant percentage of their new business comes from search engine traffic from companies like Google and Bing as well as social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

What we’ve found is that existing websites frequently need to be re-built by us to correct the common search-unfriendly mistakes that many website developers inadvertently build into their designs.

If you are in the process of shopping for a new website please give us a call at 773-769-SEMC to discuss building a search-friendly website right from the start. We have the expertise to produce effective websites from small business card sites to elaborate content management systems (CMS) or ecommerce sites to sell thousands of products online.

If you have us build your website you will be assured that it will be the effective business tool that you need in order to compete in today’s tough economic climate.

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CMS v SEO

Did you know that there is a very important relationship between Internet marketing and website Content Management Systems (CMS)?  Many people don’t.
It has become very popular in the last few years for businesses to choose to develop their websites with a Content Management System (CMS). The benefit is that a CMS gives a business the ability to add and change content on their website without special software.Unfortunately there is frequently a hidden cost to deploying a CMS: a search-unfriendly website. The consequence of a search-unfriendly site is that search engine optimization (SEO) becomes much more difficult. This, in turn, means that the marketing project will take longer, cost more and have a reduced potential for success depending on the competition.

There are many possible indications of such a website: a “?” in the page addresses, javascript statement in links, addresses that read like gobbledygook rather than clear statements of what is on the page and so on. Clarity and relevance are what leads Google to see a site as worthy of a high search engine return placement (SERP).  A search-unfriendly CMS reduces both clarity and relevance which means it will be less likely to achieve a desirable SERP.

This has been a known issue for years now but there are still developers that are either ignorant or so vested in the system that they developed that they deny this very important point. Many of the popular open source CMS have made quite a bit of progress in becoming search engine friendly. Any site that we develop at sem[c] will be created to be optimized from the onset whether or not it uses a CMS.

If you have any question about your CMS or Internet marketing please feel free to contact me for a quick analysis.  Remember, we’re Internet magicians and will make your search-invisible website appear dramatically in Google and other search engines.

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Mobile rising?

Do you see people with smart phone and tablets everywhere? Everywhere I look on the train people are reading, texting or surfing (even, occasionally, talking). With the news that Google has entered into the handset production business mobile has moved to the front burner. They made the acquisition of Motorola in defense of the Android operating system. Google now owns thousands of patents related to mobile computing. This acquisition clearly makes the statement that Google sees itself as a mobile company.

Some of the various sites that we monitor are showing over 15% of the total visits coming from mobile devices. This emphatically underscores the importance of making sure that your website is mobile-friendly. If your site relies on Flash-based navigation alone it is likely that many mobile visitors will not be able to get any of the information that they are searching for. Apple’s iOS that runs on iPhones and iPads cannot see Flash animations. This makes it very unlikely that they visitors will return to your website on their mobile devices. The good news is that the Flash can be converted to HTML5 which will preserve the functionality while, at the same time, make it accessible to all Internet-connected devices.

It should be noted here that the Web crawlers used by Google and other search engines don’t handle Flash very well either.  For SEO purposes it is a very good idea to limit Flash usage or convert it the the HTML5 alternative.

Please contact us if you have any questions about search engine optimization, social media marketing for all types of Web browsers from the desktop to your mobile handset.