The great majority of websites that we get here at Eckweb are sites that have already been built and have already been online. A great majority of those site owners claim that their web designer told them they know how to market their sites.
I have no way of knowing if this is actually true or not but I do know that the websites, for the most part are in no way optimized or prepared for the search engines. Some aren’t even ready for the public, but that’s another story!
After speaking and consulting with multiple designers over the years I do believe that there’s a sense of “it’s not important” – from the designers’ perspective. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m writing this post to once again emphasize how important every SEO factor truly is.
It’s Not Just Me Saying This
Here’s an excerpt by Adam Audette at SearchEngineLand.
This is especially well illustrated with the problem of duplicate content and canonicalization. There are several ways sites can communicate to the engines which URL is to be treated as the canonical, including:
- 301 redirects
- XML sitemaps
- rel canonical tags
- Internal linking
- External linking
Think for a moment about a typical website. It is likely to have many pages linking internally with multiple versions of URLs. The classic home page problem, for example, where sites often link to both mydomain.com and mydomain.com/index.html, is quite common. That doesn’t begin to cover the potential duplication that occurs on the enterprise level with large, complex websites and dynamic content.
This article speaks more about Canonicalization issues but the take home message is the same. The details of SEO are extremely important when it comes to marketing websites. If there are 200 different ranking factors that Google takes into consideration, and your competitor has fulfilled 130 of them but your website has only fulfilled 70 of them. Well, guess who’s going to rank higher?
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