Warning Warning!!!!

Rant coming up!

I have just spent countless hours over the last few days helping friends with their websites.

These are websites that they have paid good money for, trusting someone else to get it right for them.

In business we learn that as we do not have the  time to be the 'jack of all trades' to seek out the help of fellow professionals who can do the stuff for us that we either cannot do or do not like doing – it's called time leverage.

So for many of us web site design falls into this category.

We find someone who promises to make us a fantastic looking site that will be 'at the top of google' before we can blink and off they go to create it having pocked several hundred dollars for their efforts.

Only months down the line do we see that we are still  not at the top of page one.  In fact we are more likelyto be buried somewhere beyond page 5 where no one ever goes even in their most desperate moments.  As we do not have the technical know how we do not question this and often just accept it.

Since starting SEO In Leeds I have been working closely with some good friends to see why their sites are not ranking on the hallowed page one and quite frankly the results are horrifying.

The majority of these sites have not got proper meta data such as descriptions and keywords – some have not got anything.  Most say that they were never even consulted about their keywords, let alone any research having been done to find the best ones!

One site had absolutely 0 inbound links despite being assured that 'lots' had been added, and another had plenty (well 60)  but they were all low quality rubbish sites that bore zero relevance to the site content.  Another had about 10 and the number one spot site had over 300 but no one had advised getting more.

One site had clickable links that went no where where they were supposed to go and the copy………… don't get me started on that …… could have been written better by my 8 year old daughter.

Good quality anchor text links are ESSENTIAL for any site today and they need adding constantly to keep you at the top spot or hot on the heels of them.

It really p***** me off that these people are getting well and truly taken for a ride – based on my recent research this seems to be a fairly common practice.

Many web designers have got the creative skills to create a pretty looking site BUT unless they know how to do SEO and to do SEO maintenance then the look of the site is totally irrelevant because no one is going to see it anyway.

So, my advice is if you are looking to get a site find someone who specialises in SEO first and design second and find someone who also understands about Internet Marketing because they will be able to feed you really good ideas and they understand all about lead capture forms and email lists.

At SEO In Leeds we do specialise in building those links and we do specialise in Internet Marketing and we can build a site, so come along now and don't be shy, have a free SEO analysis where we tell you exactly what needs to be done and how it can be done.