An article by Neil MacLeod

The main idea of having a website is to increase business by promoting your products or services online. There are websites which are for customers only but on the whole we would like our website to appear in listings for words or phrases that people type into the search engines.

If your website is not performing well in the search engines you may well need a website evaluation. It may be because it was built by a website designer who concentrates more on the design of the website as opposed to the way a search engine sees the website pages. Alternatively, your website may be performing quite well but the visual aspect of the design is not quite what you want. In the latter case this may have been built by a website developer.

If you want to improve the performance of your website then you will need to use the services of a website consultant who is both a developer and website designer. They will be able to take the two views of your website. The search engine view to ensure that all the relevant information is in the correct place and the user view to check that the design befits your target audience and is easy for the user to navigate through.

By taking the advice of an independent website consultant you will be able to assess how much it would cost to improve your website for the user and the search engines. The website consultant will provide you a report on how long it would take to fix areas that they see as a concern and give you the information to take to your web company and agree changes based on your criteria. With you in the driving seat as you know how much time it would take to make the changes.

A website evaluation will normally initially consist of a keyword analysis. After a discussion with your website evaluator about your business they will be able to identify the more popular keywords or keyword phrases that people type into the search engines to find your business and possibly become potential leads.

The next step will be onsite analysis, looking at both the design of the website and the way the website is built. The experienced website consultant will be able to identify areas that require improvement and list these in a clear way with expected timescales to correct each one. They will probably also provide you with a printout of how the search engine sees your website and summarize their findings. Content will be a key area they investigate and will look for such things as duplicate content and semantic structure. Also a legality check to ensure you comply with the regulations of your country.

The third part of a website evaluation would consist of off-site marketing. They will be able to analyse how the search engines see you site in popularity terms, checking to see if links are coming in from the correct places and if the incoming links are done in the correct way to maximize your search engine positioning. Advice would be provided on how to promote the website more effectively, again with associated costs of what you would expect to pay.

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