Posted on: June 26, 2009 by Jordan Hardy
Over the years I’ve done a lot of work for companies in regards to either helping them get the right Website built, or hiring the right vendor or team to do this. A website can cost in the thousands to millions to build, depending on a number of factors:
- Is this website being built from scratch with proprietary software?
- Is the website being built based on an existing CMS platform and code tweaked/customized? An example of an open source platform is Drupal.
- Has a team been hired just for this project?
- Is this project being done by a vendor?
- Have you or the vendor done a project such as this before?
To me, for a small to medium sized business the perfect website is based on existing tools and platforms but edited and tweaked to have:
- A unique look
- Unique content
- Necessary branding
- Updated content
This way, the Website will be affordable, in the thousands of dollars and not hundreds of thousands. The website should also be built on a platform where sitewide rollouts and navigation updates are easy and possible. The website can hopefully be updated by anyone with a login. And, of course the website should be built so that online marketing / SEO elements and keyword strategy can be worked throughout.
For larger businesses, this website style can still work well plus scale. Or, a large website can be built from scratch. If you have questions, let me know as I’ve dealt with hundreds of types of top performing websites, from thousands to millions of pages.
Posted on: June 26, 2009 by Jordan Hardy
SEO is a component of online marketing. Online marketing can include SEO, SEM, press releases, social media optimization, blogging, article writing, online promotion, website roll-outs, and more. SEO can include any of these items as well in my opinion, since almost any public change to an online website can affect SEO. Here are some examples below. In these examples, “you” or “your” stands for a random person I may have met here or there.
- A new version of your website rolls out. It is missing some pages or some code has changed. Search engines index the site differently based on better or worse coding and inclusion of pages.
- Blog entries are deleted. Google may have given your website a higher pagerank based on the dates and number of entries on your blog. Now things have changed and pagerank drops.
- People are talking about you on social media websites. Search engines note various information about this and include that in their ranking for you.
- Your website is coded with non SEO friendly elements. Your competitor has their website coded with well done SEO. Even if you are the better business, your competitor has a better chance of being crawled well by search engines and indexed better.
- You have a writer that decides to copy text and cut corners. Search engines find this and ping the website.
These are just a handful of examples, but they do show it is ever so valuable to have good SEO in place. I’ve done consulting as well as worked as an employee for companies, managing SEO /online marketing departments. To do it well is both an art and a science. It is necessary that one never tries to trick search engines, but rather understand what will help both users and search engines.
Posted on: June 3, 2009 by Jordan Hardy
One client I know had worked for years creating and building their online store before hiring me to consult.They made mistakes and took considerable time away from building their business to learn Web design, online store skills, and more. Since they spent so much time away from their focus of building their actual business and line of products, their business suffered. Once they hired me, business online grew fast. I was able to implement many tested as well as new techniques to gain traffic and convert that traffic. That insight, plus testing and more targeted research when needed has helped them become not only a successful online company, but they have also been featured with their Website on quite a number of Television shows. I addition they have become a top seller in many stores.
