Fri, 2 May 2008 14:16:40 by Joe Bursell
Web developers and search engine optimizers work with the same basic commodities- web applications and the internet. Web developers (usually) create sites that look good, deliver the right information and exceed their clients' expectations. More and more they are also attuned to the requirement that a site should be able to achieve high search visibility. This means making key components search engine friendly.
Building a 100% bespoke site is becoming a rarity- sure, design look and feel, architecture and content are pretty unique factors, but the content management system (CMS) sitting in the background, and/or the database that feeds it are frequently the same. So, your designer/developer may make you a one-off web 2.0 beauty, but chances are its management system is the same as for all their other clients.
I'm not about to beat-up on this approach, it allows scale-economies that (should) get passed on to you. It also means that your tech support (should) be top-notch. If they built the CMS they should be ace at bug fixing and modding it a little to your taste. In fact there is very little bad to say about slick CMS's. That's why I've got plenty to say about rubbish CMS's.
Once upon a time it was acceptable to create a CMS that fed sites to multiple domains. These CMS's called data from a central point and squirted it into a standard template that was shared by many sites across many domains. To prevent complete duplication they had the option to substitute key words in the text, based on the domain/site in which it appeared- here's an example:
Website One:
Aircraft abrasives provided by ACorp.com, suppliers to the aircraft industry.
Website Two:
Automotive abrasion provided by BCorp.net, suppliers to the automotive industry.
4-5 years ago the search engines didn't pay much attention to this, but now they interpret this as spam. It's not too hard to see why either- there's just not enough of a difference between the two, and algorithms can pick that up instantly. So 5 years on why would I write about this? ...because they a) still exist, and b) are still being created.
Clearly, optimising sites like this is a challenge and not one to be taken lightly- but it can be done. So if your collection of sites is actually a massive spam factory, and you think that your rankings could/should be better, it is quite likely that someone like me can un-spam your web presence and unlock all the potential that was denied by the CMS.
Joe Bursell
Campaign Delivery Manager |
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