Conscious Web Design

A client contacted my yesterday to discuss his website’s low search engine ranking.  I took a look at his website and, after working out a contract, I began a deeper investigation of his site and it’s findability.  First I found that his previous web person had moved him into WordPress about three years ago, but left his old website (.html) files live on the server.  Google and other search engines frown on sloppiness, so this was the first snaffoo I corrected.

The next problem I found was worse:  the new WordPress template actually had robots.txt telling the servers not to crawl his WordPress website!  Hmmm, that would definitely lower your findability!

Although this client has a very nice looking website, it was a mess behind the scenes.  While the site was navigable and each page worked, the coding was just plain bad.  Unfortunately, I see this a lot.  It’s a classic example of what happens when web builders don’t understand the basics of Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.  To correct the situation, I moved his WordPress to a new hosting, upgraded it and reformatted the coding so search engines would approve of it.  I also made further SEO updates to help him score higher in the world of ranking.

I never know what I’ll find when I explore behind the scenes of a site, but I do know that, once I’ve done the work of SEO, the site will be found and liked by search engines.