Re-Launching A Website

7/15/2009

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Many potential clients call with their SEO and web design war stories, wanting to find a designer and SEO provider they can trust. Dozens of people that call explain that they have paid an individual or SEO company X amount of dollars and after months, years, etc, they cannot be found on the search engines. Unlike the desperation of some companies we see, throwing more wood on the fire and hoping for a fine tuned solution is not the answer. If a site, under the current build, has failed to do well with the search engines after your SEO professional did their magic - continuing to perform their empty wizardry is not going to dislodge the virtual anchor the search engines have hung around your website's neck. This is all within reason. If you do come up within certain search criteria and you just want every phrase under the sun, well, that is not the type of site being described here. Churning a website over and over again, changing a sentence or two, or even revamping all the content will still yield very few results in the search engines if it is in the same context of code. The search engines will give little weight scanning the new content in the same old architecture. It needs to look like it is completely changed. Sometimes the content is fine and retooling the code around it acts like a spring cleaning of sorts and the search engines get through the site better and then the site gains a better reputation with the search engines, more able to boost the related content to their users. Content is supremely important, but it is sometimes the practices of an SEO firm, or the tools and/or code of a designer that stops the search engines from getting a good look at your content. All is not lost. Sometimes the site just needs a tune up and it may start running. If your designer cannot code differently, having someone else code the same site may bring a world of good to the site. A similar analogy is when a team switches a coach, to breathe fresh ideas into the team, because the other coach's ways are well absorbed and he has brought the team as far as he could. It is a similar idea with facing the search engines with your site.