I have “rescued” several websites for people in the last couple of years. All had fallen foul of a less than savvy/honest web designer… (see: Has a copy of Frontpage 2001, made a site for their uncle and is now a Web Designer.)

When I get a phone call or email about someones website not getting any visitors or them not getting enquiries etc the first thing I ask is;

“Does your site show up in search results?”

To which the answer invariably is,

“Yes! In fact it shows up as number one in Google.”

Impressive, so what’s the problem? If their site is showing up top spot on the worlds number one search engine why aren’t they getting any traffic?..

So my next question is;

“What search terms to you show up top for?”

“Well it’s when we type our website name in… why?”

Deep breath.

Me: “Well the thing is, it’s not very likely that someone who has never heard of you is going to type your domain name into a search engine is it?”

Client: “I suppose not, we do advertise in a magazine so people reading that will see our domain name won’t they? They’ll type it in won’t they?”

Me: “Possibly but most likely they’ll type your url into their browsers address bar and go directly to your site. What is your website about?”

Client: “We have a couple of holiday cottages in Cornwall that we rent out.”

Me: “Ok, so really you want your website to show up in search results if someone types in something like ‘holiday cottages Cornwall‘ or ‘Cornish holiday cottages‘ then.”

Client: “Yes, that would be great, I see what you mean a stranger is more likely to type that in search than our domain name aren’t they?”

Me: “Exactly, by the way what is your domain name?”

Client: “www.freddyandsandras.co.uk”

Me: “… …”

Me: “Well there’s not much we can do about your domain name, it would be better if it contained keywords relevant to your service. Would you consider registering a new domain something like cornwallholidaycottages.com?.. with keywords like that in your domain you’d be off to a much better start.”

Client: “Well we would, I see what you mean about the name but we’re already paying £30 a month for our existing domain name and hosting.”

Me: “Ouch! That’s a little on the high side but we can talk about that later. I’ve just had a quick look at your website and had a look at all the code that is used to make it all work etc and it’s a pretty bleak picture I’m afraid.”

Client: “Oh dear, we thought something must be wrong. What’s the matter with it and what will it cost to fix it?”

Me: “There are a lot of things missing that need to be included in the behind the scenes coding, some photos could be optimized better and your menu navigation needs looking at. Currently it’s just graphic buttons pointing to pages called page1.html and page2.html.

It gets a bit more involved but basically, graphics are invisible to search engines unless they’re given what called an alt tag, a textual description of the image. The alt tag further benefits by using keywords in it. The button on the navigation menu that points to the Rose Cottage page could be given the alt tag “Rose Holiday Cottage, Available For Rent In Cornwall” . then, the actual link to page1.html could be given a title tag again using some keywords to describe the link destination, Rose Cottage.

Text is much better for navigation links all round and page file names would be better called rose-holiday-cottage.html rather than page1.html. If the menu button needs to stay looking like the current graphic it can be made to look like that using a technique called CSS but that’s for another day.

Anyway I’ll put it all together and get in touch with you in the next couple of days with some ideas and suggestions rather than do it now over the phone. I’ll write up everything I can find and email it to you along with a rough idea of how long and what might be involved to fix it. I can also set you up with domain name registration and hosting for a LOT less than £30 a month.”

Client: “Ok, thanks a lot, I don’t think I’m going enjoy reading through it though. Bye for now.”

Me: “Don’t worry, the appraisal will be totally free to you and I’m sure we can come up with a fair way of taking it from there. Bye.”

And that has been kind of the way the chat went each time, a very disappointed person who had paid good money to a … well I won’t say to what. When you hear the figure £1500 mentioned plus £30 a month for hosting and you go to the site and see:

• A bunch of table cells thrown together (default borders always pleasant to see).
• Times New Roman text just resized for headers no H1, H2 etc used,
• No <head> title tag
• No meta description… a what?
• No alt or title tags used.
• Awful file names like page1.html
• Roaming navigation (homepage it’s at the top, page2 at the left, page 3 over at the right and so on) that swaps around the contents or even misses some out on some pages.
• Photos that are over 1MB but just click and dragged to fit the cell or the more advanced ones using width=”300″ to display a 3000 pixel wide image.
• A multitude of dead links, broken image links and having to constantly use the browser back button to navigate back…

Not good, and there are a lot out there – offering special discounts, £500.00 for a website that not worth £5.00

So, if you have a website that you think could do with a bit of a spring clean, drop me an email. I’ll gladly have a look.

You’ve seen the search results, something like this:

Nice Keyword Title (from the <title> tag)
Here’s the keyword text that is taken from the description keyword rich meta tag with more keyword text here from the description keyword rich meta tag.
http://www.mykeywordwebsite.com

You can see how keywords used in the search are highlighted bold in the search results if they’re there in the site title, description and url. All those extra bold keywords within the result naturally draw a persons eye to it. It might not be the top result on page one of Google but it might stand out more than the top result!

My point is the description meta tag is used by the search engine to display the text below the search result link… This means you can control what the search engine result shows the person searching.

If the description meta tag is left blank or removed totally the search engine spider will just grab some random text snippet from the page and display that. You might be lucky and it’ll grab something useful but it might be some crud from your site footer.

In my opinion the description meta tag should still be used to describe the page and include the keywords you want to show up in search results.