Know when to SEO and when to rebuild your site from scratch

Many businesses have professional website designers build their website with little or no thought put into how people will find their website. People find websites by using search engines.  Most web designers know little or nothing about marketing.  Many people and web development companies see design as the most important aspect of a website and search engine optimization is just an afterthought. This is where search engine optimization comes into play.

SEO friendly websites are likely to show up above non SEO websites in search results. We receive calls and emails from companies all the time asking if we can optimize their website. The reality is, if your website was not planned and designed with SEO in mind it can be difficult, if not impossible to get your website to the top of the search engines.

Search engine optimization involves designing and building the underlying code of a website around the known search engine algorithms. Designing an SEO website involves proper placement of certain items like where heading tags are located and images are placed. If your website was not originally designed with optimization in mind it is likely that many of the factors used in ranking a website are missing. Once a website is built it is typically very hard to change the design layout making it difficult to SEO the design. Often times it is cheaper to just redesign and rebuild a website search engine optimized than it is to optimize an existing website design. Not only is it cheaper to start out with an SEO design but it also gives you a better chance to get your website to the top of the search engines.

One of the biggest things that affect a website’s search engine ranking is how it was built.  Websites built using table cells, Frames and Flash will have little or no chance or ranking over other more search engine friendly design. Newer, search engine optimized websites are built using external CSS and JavaScript. Search engines like to have more content on pages than code, which is why external CSS is better for SEO. In order to change a website from table-cell to CSS it requires a website to be rebuilt which can get costly. If you are going to pay to have a website rebuilt to make it search engine optimized, why not pay a little more to get a new SEO design and get it built search engine optimized.

The more content a website has the better it will rank in search engines. Websites that are not search engine optimized seem to lack content. Content can typically be added to help with ranking, but sometimes a website is built in a way that does not allow for changes. It makes more sense to start building SEO from the ground up. If you can add content to your website, it might offer a better search engine ranking, but it might not help at all. If you do not use all of the known search engine algorithms there is no guarantee your website will do better.

Making changes to an existing website means going through someone else’s code. Not every web developer builds websites the same so going through someone else’s code could be challenging. It means the web developer before they make any changes, would first need to go through the code to figure out what everything does. That process can be quite time consuming which could cost a lot of money. Paying for a new SEO website many times is less expensive than paying someone to make your existing website search engine optimized, not to mention you will probably get better results.

In the end there really are only small changes that can be made to existing sites to make them a little more search engine optimized. Are those small changes going to get you the search engine ranking you want? Most likely no. If you do not take all of the known search engine algorithm factors into account there is not guarantee your website will get the ranking you want. Many website companies say changes will make a big difference, but the reality is the most certain and sometimes cheapest way to get a better ranking is to build a new SEO website.

Contact Optigroove if you would like to discuss more about SEO or if you would like to get a new search engine optimized website.