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It’s hard to believe the number of businesses who pay lots of money to get a website created and then sit back and expect the new business, leads, and profit from sales to start flowing in automatically – and are then stunned and surprised when they don’t. Frequently they will go back to the web design company and hold them responsible over the matter.
Of course while the business owner is berating the unfortunate web designer they have forgotten one vital thing…
The web site designer is just that. A web site designer. And he has done the task he was asked to do and created a nice looking web site for the business owner. It’s very probable that what he is NOT is an SEO professional! But none of that really matters as it is almost guaranteed that it never crossed the business owners mind to inquire if SEO was included, or if it was included if it covered just on-page SEO, or off-page SEO as well.
Frequently the problem is ‘unconscious incompetence’ on the part of the business owner. That’s not intended to be derogatory. It is merely a technical term for when you simply can’t ask relevant questions about something, not because you can’t think of a good question, but because you don’t even know that thing exists or never had any experience of it. In other words, you can’t ask questions about SEO if you’ve never even heard of it!
Ask yourself though, is a website designer really the right person to be carrying out your search engine optimization for you? Of course, it is really useful if on-page SEO is taken into account and carried out as the site is being built, but using someone who just dabbles in SEO, or THINKS they know SEO is not a good plan!
Why?
Well, the search engines are continually changing the algorithms that they use to calculate who gets ranked where. Keeping up with these changes and what works and doesn’t work NOW all takes a significant amount of time. It’s no good knowing the things produced good results a year or two ago, as they may not work now, and in fact using these ‘old’ techniques can often do more harm than good.
Keyword stuffing, tiny text, and hidden (or virtually hidden) text are just some of the examples of SEO tricks that used to work and could regularly get you high placement, but today would almost certainly result in getting your page or website banned or seriously penalised.
For a website to rank highly in the search engines you HAVE to have on-page search engine optimization, and regular off-page search engine optimization work carried out on the website. There are just far too many competitors out there for your website to rank well otherwise. And keep in mind that even if you aren’t taking SEO seriously you can be in no doubt that your competitors are! Google doesn’t play favourites. Your competitors rank higher than you because they have paid an SEO professional to make sure that all the factors are in place that Google wishes to see in a top ranking and highly relevant web page.
Your web business is far too important to ignore SEO, or worse, to leave it to a well meaning web designer. You NEED to do search engine optimization PROPERLY, and for that you need an SEO specialist.
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