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Invisible Websites
By Derrick | October 13, 2008
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One of my current projects is a review site for a niche market - event companies in South Africa. It’s a tiny market in global terms, but there are a couple of hundred companies working in the industry. When business confidence starts to drop, the big corporates tend to spend more on advertising and events like product launches (at least they should be…)
I’ve been surveying websites in this niche for my review site. So far, I’ve tested 28 of the sites on my list, favoring the larger companies and the ones I’m most familiar with.
I was struck by how generally awful they are from a marketing perspective. Splash pages and Flash-based navigation are more common than one would expect. Most of the sites are inwardly focused - “So-and-So Productions has been in operation since 1996, when Algernon So-and-So came up with the vision to create the most fabulous production company in the world” - rather than focusing on what the potential client wants. Only a couple have a newsletter of any kind; I found exactly one site with a blog (on Blogger.com, so really not much use for search engine ranking).
Checking the search engine optimization with one of the tools I use (the Domain Tools SEO Score tool) shows 7 sites out of 28 with an SEO score better than 80%, and 8 sites out of 28 with a score of 0% - usually because there’s no text on the home page, because it’s Flash-based.
In South Africa, due to parastatal inefficiencies, Internet access has always been expensive and slow. Only about 11% of the population has Internet access - that’s about 5 million people. Because of this, small businesses don’t take the Internet seriously. The fact that these businesses don’t get many customers from the Internet means that their websites can be ‘vanity sites’ or brochure sites, just the same as all the others.
Still, there’s no excuse for having a website which is, to all intents and purposes, invisible to the search engines. I blame the web designers. Even if the client insists on a site with nothing but crossfading pictures, you can still add at least a meta description and a keyword-optimized page title.
Here’s my favorite “invisible to the search engines” site (to think I worked there 25 years ago… )
To be fair, this site is first on Google for the company name. That doesn’t help if your potential clients have never heard of you…
Tags: business confidence, corporates, marketing, niche market, search engine optimization, search engines, SEO, small businesses, South Africa, web designers
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October 13th, 2008 at 6:28 pm
I am also constantly amazed by how it seems most large companies just don’t seem to get the Internet, always stuffing their site with Flash etc.
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October 15th, 2008 at 3:13 am
Ah the infamous invisible websites. I don’t understand how some companies get away with this. Or rather, how CEO’s let their webmasters get away with this. Makes you wonder how much business and money they’re losing.
In fairness, Google is trying hard to index and crawl flash pages now-a-days, but its far from a good solution. It’s worth having a standard HTML website for search engines to crawl and index, to go along with your flash page.
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October 21st, 2008 at 4:01 pm
I recently looked into an established niche and saw this same sort of thing - all sorts of crap. So many of these companies get fat dumb and happy and don’t realize they could be doing so much more.
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October 23rd, 2008 at 4:47 am
Google is trying hard to index and crawl flash pages now-a-days, but its far from a good solution. It’s worth having a standard HTML website for search engines to crawl and index.
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October 23rd, 2008 at 5:11 pm
I agree with John…why is it that people feel they have to use flash all of the time? I’d take HTML any day over Flash..
October 30th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
Google spiders do a great job of crawling the net. I had a website go to pr4 in three months from existence.
November 4th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
I have ever done this job well but not well paid. The client really dumb..:((
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November 4th, 2008 at 7:06 pm
I took several web design courses at school, none of them emphasizing meta tags or anything remotely related to SEO. It took a couple months of portfolio not being indexed for me to realize what SEO was, or why it’s important to a website.
November 5th, 2008 at 1:22 am
I love domain tools - I’ve used it many times when calculating SEO scores.
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November 6th, 2008 at 10:06 pm
Another interesting SEO evaluation tool is below - the SEO Challenge where you can put two websites head-to-head to see which one is better optimized:
http://www.linkvendor.com/seo-tools/seo-challenge.html
November 18th, 2008 at 5:36 am
This is really a pretty common problem. I’ve done some web design in the past, and in my experience, the client guides these decisions. All I can do is make suggestions as to why things are a bad idea. In the end, someone is writing me a check that keeps a roof over my head. If they want animated moving flags, an unskippable splash page, and no text than by golly that’s what they’ll get.
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