Planning on redesigning your site but have a tight budget? You may want to rethink how you are going to spend your funds. Sure you can look into outsourced companies, chop shops, pre-designed templates or student designers, but in most cases (not to be cliche) you are going to get what you pay for. As long as your site is not a usability nightmare and looks like it was designed in 1990, there are a lot of other ways to draw attention and traffic to your site that are more important than a few bells and whistles.  Here are a few things you may want to allocate more time/money towards that in a business sense will be more advantageous to your site. If you are interested in getting help with any of them, please let us know! (more…)

If you are considering or are currently having a Web site developed for you, there is a good chance you may have come across the term SEO (search engine optimization). If not, Wikipedia has a very in depth article with everything you need to know and more. In basic terms this means using specific methods in order to make your site appear higher in the list of sites when you search on Google, Yahoo or any other popular search engine. This includes the structure of your site, the coding of the pages, and even file and page names.  There are many companies that specialize in assisting you to create a site that is highly visible to search engines, and drive more traffic to your site. However, if you are planning on contracting the services of such a company please read on for some insight into why this may be a bad idea.Assumed Solutions
The first thing a client should know about search engine optimization is that nobody is 100% sure how sites are indexed. Rankings used to be determined solely upon keywords and descriptive meta-tags on your pages, however over time these were abused by spammers and now they do not have the pull that they used to. Now, the methods and algorithms change consistently and thus a site that had a high rank last week may not be doing as well this week. Many SEO companies will work over a contracted period of time (months to years) on researching newer methods and determining if you page needs updating. That is, if you have hired a reliable company. Many clients are not up to speed with SEO and thus have no idea or understand of what is happening beneath the curtains. In a sense you are trusting this company is doing the work you are paying for, but have nothing to prove that they are helping since you are most likely not a technical professional.

No Guarantees
Since nobody is sure of the exact methods used to determine page ranks, many SEO companies will have a “No Guarantee” clause in their contract. This is like saying “we aren’t confident in our quality of work”. Can you imagine purchasing a product and not being able to return it even if it never worked? It is like gambling except the only two possible results are breaking even and losing it all. I will stick to blackjack.

Advertising vs. Page Rank
So you contract an SEO company that either develops your Web site, or works with another development company you have selected. Each month this company works on updating your site, trying new methods, and seeing if there are any new ways to increase your site rank. New links are posted referring to your site, blogs comments and articles are written, etc. Then you receive the bill for $3,000 each month for their services. What if you had used that $3,000 and bought advertising space on a site, sponsored an event, or even placed an ad in an offline publication? After a year this could total up to be over $20,000 in “optimizing” your Web site! Of course this is an example, as there are many SEO companies that charge far less although I cannot speak for their quality of service.

Disregard for Human Interaction
SEO companies can become very focused on developing a site and catering specifically for search engines. However they can also lose focus of your primary goal: customers and profits. If your site is #1 on all search engines but when a user visits it cannot navigate easily and does not feel that overall sense of trust in your site, then you have wasted your resources on having a highly searchable but unusable site. Remember that your developer should focus on your goals not on theirs. There should be an understanding of what you wish to achieve, and there should be no sacrifice just to bump your site up a listing or two.

Site-By-Site Basis
If you are a smaller company that does a majority of it’s business offline, and your site is used specifically to drive traffic to your store, I do not believe hiring a professional SEO company is worth your time, effort, and money. If you have hired a good Web developer they should already be using the necessary tactics in order to make your site visible to search engines and online visitors. Remember that most developers in an SEO company are just like any other Web developer, only they cater to a specific service and will market themselves accordingly. Why pay the extra money for a service that is already included in your Web development package?

I am by no means saying that all SEO companies are a sham and should not be used. I am merely pointing out that they may not be necessary if you are already receiving the same services with your current or future developer. As with any investment of time or money, do your research and gain a basic understanding of what the underlying work includes so that you are not persuaded into purchasing an unnecessary product or service.