Even with the greatest efforts, some websites are never able to gain any significant ranking in the search engines. As a result, they see no visitors. Many people don’t realize that a failure to rank is due not only to their on-page and off-page SEO efforts, but the architecture of the website itself.
In the good old days, anything that was put on the web would be indexed and ranked by the search engines within a matter of days, regardless of its underlying code and design. However, as the web has grown into billions of pages, this is no longer possible. Today it’s “garbage in, garbage out”. In other words, the search engine spiders (the automated robots that scan web pages for indexing) first run a quick check of the page before indexing it. If it doesn’t meet their established technical and usability guidelines – for any reason – the page is discarded and the search engine spider moves on to another site.
Unfortunately, even the most experienced business people are often not aware of the workings of these issues, or of how significantly they can affect their business – both on and off-line. For that reason, expert website design is critical to your ecommerce success.
Websites that aren’t constructed to meet the exacting best practices in design and technical implementation not only suffer from lack of search engine attention and a lack of visitors, they are more expensive to maintain due to such shortcomings. Therefore, websites that aren’t designed to the highest levels of industry standards are more problematic and costly, leading to an inability to effectively compete online.
A professionally designed website that’s structurally sound on both the inside and the outside will have a far greater chance of showing up on the first page of natural search results than a site that isn’t. Simply put, high-level website design and development is the first step to achieving any significant success online.
How well is your website working for you?
My website is pretty new and my site/store hasn’t officially launched, so I am unsure of how my website is working for me yet. Furthermore, I am still working on my site (using Joomla) so it might be months before I get an idea of what further steps I need to take to get my rankings high. I will definitely keep this post in mind.