SEO Poseur or Pro- Is Your Web Professional Competent Pt1
BySEO and Web Design are critical to the success of your business’ website. If you can’t be found (SEO) you might as well not have a web site. If your website is not user friendly once you get traffic you will not have any sticky readers who come back again and again to find your great content. A new website can cost thousands of dollars and can be a major investment for a small business owner. How do you know if your designer is a poseur or a pro? What can you do if you have already been burned and now are left with the mess to fix or clean up? Shannon Evans and Rich Geasey authors of Get Found Now Local Search Secrets Exposed are thrilled to announce that their second book in the series Get Found Now Search Engine Optimization Secrets Exposed is expected to release Feb 15. The following excerpt is designed to help you filter out the poseurs and uncover the real professional who can help you and your business get found on the internet!
Your personal or business website is likely your primary medium for providing information to potential and current customers or clients. Today, an Internet search is typically the primary way someone begins their search for goods and services. Therefore, your website needs to be on the first page of a search engines’ results (for most of us that’s Google). Not on page one? Well, less than 10% of searchers ever venture any further.
Despite this fact, most business and professional websites are essentially useless in delivering first page search results, even in the case of very specific keyword searches. Why is that? For the most part nearly every small business website is not search engine optimized (SEO) in the least. Is this the fault of the site owner? No, it’s the fault of the designer or developer of the site. A competent web designer or developer takes the time to research the keywords a site owner needs to use to have success on the search engines. Next, the designer or developer needs to use those keywords and the process of SEO to give the site the opportunity to appear on the first page of the search engine.
How do you know if your site is optimized, or more importantly if your designer or developer has the skill to achieve this? Well, a great tool is available to assist in this process and it’s called Website Grader (www.websitegrader.com). While Website Grader is not the definitive answer to how good a website is, it is a great tool to compare sites and see how you, and your designer or developer stack up.
Website Grader analyses your website for completeness of SEO efforts. After the analysis it compares the site with their database of nearly two million sites and provides it with final score of 1 to 100. A score of 90 or better and you are doing all the right things as far as SEO is concerned. A score in the 80s shows you are working it hard and with a bit more time and effort you will be doing great. In the 70s you have some work to do but you are getting there. 50 to 70 is OK if there are no serious issues the report highlights, it may simply be you have a new site and it needs time to be searched. Less than 50 and the site is poorly done and simply is not visible to search engines (or very, very new).
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