brandiboyd.com

Your company may not have a need for a website that is being published to on a daily basis and you maybe quite happy with your existing website design. But a website, just like a car or a home, requires a bit of maintenance, upkeep, and upgrades to stay current and most useful to you. These things don’t need to cost a mint or take months of time; upgrades and maintenance can be implemented in stages to reduce costs and stresses.

My home inspector,Bob of  Precision Inspection recently contacted me to have ‘title tags’ put in his website, an understated informational site with a design featuring his logo, about 5 years old. He was looking for a quick fix to increase his search engine rankings, had been doing some reading, and learned that his site didn’t have them and they might help.

Before rushing in to do the work I gave the site an inspection of my own; knowing that simply adding title tags might not be enough, and in fact might hurt more than help. A quick once over and a look at the  internet archives and google cache for the site told me I was right.  I knew Bob wasn’t looking for a total re-design, jut better search engine rankings; but the reasons for his poor rank required in essence, a total overhaul, at least.

Why? Bob’s information for the site hadn’t changed since it’s design over five years ago. His logo is the same, and he likes the look of his site. The reason is, it was designed over five years ago; and design standards have changed. It used frames, which are essentially separate browser windows- one for each menu, header, and content area….plus an extra for the active state of the menu; totaling four separate files making up one page. Pulled together using frames, this caused search engines to read each frame as a separate page on the site, whether it was a menu repeated on every page, or the content of a page. The site had been designed without much META information in the header, including title tags, description and keyword tags. And it had no robots.txt file or .htaccess rules keeping the spiders from crawling the many duplicate files in the site.

I offered Precision the option of keeping the look and feel of the site identical, and simply upgrading the code from a table and frame based design to current valid XHTML, adding META information and search engine specific rules. This acheived the goal of better search engine results; but left the long standing branding of the company in place and offered a much less expensive and intensive process than a complete re-design. I call it an overhaul or a tune up….and we were done in a week.

While adding more, fresher content regularly would certainly help any static and informational site, keeping the site error free and meeting current validation standards is a basic must to get good search engine listings.  Doing this alone took Bob’s site from well past page ten in local search results for “Austin home inspector” to page three of the results. Not stellar ranking, but much better than page seventeen! And over time, I hope to help Precision Inspection improve their results even more by adding easy ways for them to publish new information to their site as often as they wish.