I’ve just this week done reviews for several clients about why their organic placement is slipping or is non-existent. There has been a common thread to each of these clients. The code on their site is bad, in some cases really bad. What exactly do I mean?
In some cases a site is so old or has so many problems that a redesign may actually be cheaper than a rework of the code to try to bring a website better performance. Here are several specifics to consider:
- Is your website built from a host’s template? Guess what, it may be pretty but contains code that slows page load time (which Google considers and weighs now for organic placement). Additionally there are missed opportunities to build in SEO tactics as you even name elements when you use a template.
- Is your site built with FrontPage and you are pasting in content from Word? Did you know that many of these WSIWYG that is What You See Is What You Get editors (not Dreamweaver fortunately) add all kinds of depreciated tags or span and style tags to the actual paragraph itself. This makes a page so very code heavy, slows speed, and makes it very hard for a webmaster to update. If you don’t update a site in FrontPage where it has been created and is how it is managed your can really mess up the webmasters syncing protocol and potentially lock them out from doing further updates. In fact, even worse is that FrontPage has been depreciated by Microsoft and so not even used by most professional webmasters. When I see code that FrontPage has created I know that the site may have been built in 2005 or about that time which is really pretty old technology.
- When you consider what it costs to have someone like me review and upgrade the code, rework the content to use SEO tactics on an old site or a template-driven site, a new design may actually be more cost efficient. It is simply not a good idea to spend $2,500 to $3,000 to rework a very old website, or one that is controlled by a template where certain aspects simply cannot be changed.
For sites such as this where the site owner may not have the money for a redesign, there is still hope. There are inbound marketing approaches that can be done in the meantime to help build link activity, and content creation updates that can help a site until there is the budget for a full redesign. Sometimes even just the rework of the home page can put a bandaid temporarily on the problem until there is more money available for a redesign and upgrade.