Throw Away Your Money on Search Engine Optimization

Mike Banks Valentine

Search engine optimization consists of some relatively arcane
issues that are not obvious to anyone. That I can be thankful
for, I suppose, or I wouldn't continue to be in demand as an
SEO specialist. But why do clients throw money out the window
with developers who don't understand they are bulldozing down
site naming structure and careful page architecture when they
do a site redesign?

Today I got a call from a very good client who was excited to
have me see his site redesign and sent me off to visit while
he was on the phone. I typed in the domain name and watched
the page load in my browser. Nice color scheme, interesting
scrolling header, clean design, good navigation. "Looks Good,"
I said, and then my heart sank when I noted that my carefully
crafted title tag was missing from the browser title bar.

I clicked to the sitemap and noticed that my naming convention
for pages, subdirectories and image files had been discarded
like yesterdays trash. I went to the source code and saw that
all the javascript we had neatly pulled off page and assigned
to independent off-page .js files was back on the page again,
along with the CSS styles. Oh, and no description metatags.

I began to groan audibly as I made each of these discoveries,
forgetting that my client was on the line. My heart leapt back
into my throat as I looked for all the great articles, press
releases, additional text content I had conscientously added
and found them missing from the site entirely!

My client responded to my noises with an exclamation that his
new site was "State of the Art!" and "Completely Automated" as
he pointed out the cool new functions and slick scripts. "Only
one problem," he said, still gushing about the expensive toys,
goodies and googaws on his pretty new baby - "We dropped from
our first page rankings in the search engines, what happened?"

I won't detail what I said as I exploded in anger at the havoc
his developer wreaked upon my lovingly optimized pages, but
after I calmed a bit (thank goodness he's a good client and a
friend) I detailed the developer's unknowing destruction.

Do you realize that ALL links to previous pages will generate
"404 Not Found" errors from links in the search engines until
these new pages are crawled? Do you realize that EVERYTHING I
did to get top rankings has been destroyed?! Do you understand
that ALL the money you gave me to optimize your site will have
to be spent AGAIN?

This exchange has happened with several clients over the past
few years. Even though I warn each new client that they must
take care to avoid exactly this scenario when they have a site
redesigned or upgraded. DON'T CHANGE FILENAMES, DON'T OVERWRITE
TITLE TAGS, KEEP JAVASCRIPT & CSS STYLES OFF THE PAGE, ETC.

This week I had a client call asking why the site changes he
had agreed to a month ago had not been completed. I reminded
him that he'd asked me to send those changes to his developer
so that the changes were in-house rather than giving me server
access.

I've got a new excuse to use now. The developer did it, or in
this case - didn't do it. This developer saw no need to post
my thoroughly researched title tags, based on keyword density
of each page, to every one of the site's 300 pages. No matter
that I'd spent days researching keywords, adjusting page text
and massaging all title tags to match. The developer was busy.

The last straw for me came today though. A client called to
find out if we could avoid the extensive rework of his site
needed to do the "URL re-writes" that he'd agreed to do in
the contract we signed recently. Why? "My programmer tells
me it will take him a month to do this without breaking the
site scripts." I reminded him that this had been discussed
in our meeting last month when the programmer balked at all
the work that would be required of him.

No problem, I said, we can go another route, but it will cost
you twice as much for my immediate work and ultimately more
than three times as much in your Pay-Per-Click budget FOREVER.
You won't rank nearly as well in the organic search listings.

Most of your site will never be indexed by most search engines
unless you pay for mass URL inclusion, and that only works for
one search engine - Yahoo, since everyone else has stopped the
paid inclusion programs. Google doesn't offer paid inclusion.
(Google and partners send nearly 70% of search traffic to him
and most other sites.)

"Oh!", he exclaimed. "Well, ultimately the programmer will do
what he's paid to do, like it or not."

Hmmm. Well I like it. Maybe my best weapon against developers
and programmers opposed to SEO requirements will be those PPC
budgets and Google's lack of paid inclusion program.

About the Author

Mike Banks Valentine is SEO for
http://InsuranceDirectory411.com and
http://Auto-Accident-Lawyer-Directory.com where he had some
of the experiences detailed in the article above.

This article is available online at:
http://www.website101.com/arch/archive155.html

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