| SEO
Book Chapter 1- Section 11
| Corporate
Web Sites – Chronic Underachievers
Corporate
Web sites are plagued with competing purposes, unconscious
expectations and rigid design built around brand imagery.
What results, is a site that will never be found by customers
and new products for anything.
Many
SEO firms face this as their biggest task in trying to make
corporate sites visible in the search engines. With individual
departments, content contributors, content management systems
adding to the complexity of a Web site, search engine optimization
is almost impossible. At the risk of sounding unfairly critical
though, we have to acknowledge just how complicated the optimization
of a huge Web site is.
The
corporate Web site has exceptional expectations, yet they
will only be achieved if the company’s online business
functions, marketing communications and agility to respond
can be conducted simultaneously.
Since
this is very difficult given the complexity and the limited
skills of company production staff, it is best to provide
a controllable front end to a corporate Web site for better
optimization. When the actual business processes are conducted
behind a secure area of the Web site and not exposed to the
search engine robots, the “front end” of the site
is search engine optimizable.
However,
large sites with many pages do have an advantage, which is
why some companies will seek to have dynamically generated
or back end pages indexed by the search engines. Their voluminous
content can be so well integrated from a keyword standpoint,
that they don’t worry about the e-business/branding/Se-optimization
conflict.
These
companies are truly competitive at the top level of optimization
and thus have awesome ranking power. Smaller sites can only
hope the search engines will build something into their index
algorithm to even things up. Since search engines seek to
be profitable, I wouldn’t hold out too much hope for
that.
|
Navigation, Repetition
and Consistency
As you
plan and write your navigation scheme or your page content, try
not to overdo it with repetition and over-consistency. Search engines
have filters
in their database programs which look for repetitive material and
duplicate pages. They either downplay their significance or disregard
the page completely. It seems insignificant, but you’ll end
up with less ranking power and lower rankings.
Traditional
Web navigation and design schemes recommend consistent, repeated,
and even templated design for Web sites. These types of sites often
rank poorly and even then only for a few keyword phrases. They are
not search engine performers.
What you
have to achieve in your menus and pages is built-in inconsistency
that doesn’t confuse or baffle visitors. Yes, the people who
arrive at your site still have to navigate the pages to find what
they’re interested in. This built-in variability, if done
correctly, should cause minimal discomfort for visitors.
Organizing
and synthesizing a site’s navigation scheme is simple for
a few phrases, such as in our example site. Optimizing a site for
hundreds of keywords is a tough, heavy-duty project and often brings
strong complaints from every party involved in the site. If search
engine referals are important then the executive level decision
should dictate that some user-discomfort is inevitable, even with
good design. Perhaps the marketing and design team could provide
something visually, or offer bonus value of some sort that will
compensate for the visitor’s discomfort. If giving the visitor
good value is a priority, it won’t take you long to find something.
By building
inconsistency into your site, such as through using special menus
for Web site sections and having sidebars for special content, the
search engine is more likely to treat the page as something worthwhile
and unique. That includes hyperlinks too.
By using
different combinations of hyperlinks in your body copy, you increase
the potential presence of the page in search engine indexes. The
links are needed to prove relevance and uniqueness.
If you’re
stuck with rigid, templated design, you should try to make the copy
in the individual pages unique, along with the title tags, heading
tags and alt tags. Unique images may help too. Page templates do
have editable areas designated by the designer. Ask them to make
as much of the page content editable as possible.
If you’re
involved with a large corporate site that has strong appearance
and style guidelines, these will be a drawback you’ll have
to compensate for. A lot of the difficult work in search engine
optimization and writing, comes from this need to compensate for
the weakness or rigidity of style guidelines, page content, construction
and navigation.
This is
one of the biggest reasons for search engine spamming,
the use of deceptive techniques to gain high ranking. The site is
so difficult to optimize because of its design, the Web site marketer
or Webmaster is left with no
<< Previous | Next
>> |
SEO
Book Preview
Chapter
1-1
Chapter
1-2
Chapter
1-3
Chapter
1-4
Chapter
1-5
Chapter
1-6
Chapter
1-7
Chapter
1-8
Chapter
1-9
Chapter
1-10
Chapter
1-11
Chapter
1-12
Chapter
1-13 |
