Does Your Website Work For Your Business?

Without search engine optimization (SEO) your site is just like a business card sitting on a desk in an office somewhere in the world. You have to buy advertising in various different places in order to give directions to that card.

You can build a website in just a few days! A lot of people just pick out a theme (like on Wordpress) from the thousands that are available (because coding is tedious) and all you have to do is in these themes is just fill in the blanks, but let me just tell you a little secret. May of these themes are not always optimized to point to your site. There's a reason why they are free. The coding is almost always going to have something that points to the author of the theme. Also, themes do not allow for placement of graphics anywhere on the page. That is the freedom in learning the coding. You can put a graphic anywhere and have it move anywhere.

There is a difference between someone who can build a website (anyone can) and a web developer. If you want to see if your site is optimized for the Google Search Engine, there is a tool for you to check it (or at least check out the work of your web developer), here's what you do: First, you have to have a gmail account. Then go to Google Webmaster Tools, then click Structured Data Testing Tool, enter your URL and click RUN TEST. You can check on the code of any site you want. On the left is the code for your site, on the right is what the engine actually sees from your code. If you want to compare what you see to a site that I have coded with SEO enter URL: http://mgsrefrigeration.com. I haven't updated this site in a while and there are a couple of errors, but they are minor. This site gives the information regarding the business and all the services it provides. This business has been nominated best HVAC business in Otero County for years running and has had to triple their staff since the site went up.

This is only the half of why this is important. People who have disabilities also need this coding. For those that are blind, this coding is what is read to them. There is all kinds of information that can be added to this code but at the very least you should have your site name, address, business, types of services, your social media accounts. Authors can have their name, publish date, title, article summary, etc. The coding can also point to your social media with “same as” codes.

This coding is not the easiest thing in the world to learn and that's why a lot of people don't use it. It was easier for me because I used to be a typesetter, but this is how your site attracts customers all on it's own. That's not to say you still won't have to drive traffic to it; but every little bit helps.

In short, it's fine to have a basic business card website if you are trying to attract customers who already know that they are looking for you by name, but if you are trying to attract people who are searching for generic terms like “places to have fun” or "contractors in berkeley springs" or something like that, you need the SEO.

Blogger is a themed site as well. That's what these themed sites were designed for -- blogs. If you own a businesses, it's simply just best to go to the time and expense of a real landing page with all your information along with the structured data information. Then you can link over to your really pretty site.