You know your web site needs help when someone enters your business name and city and you don’t come up in the first page of Google results.

Having a professional looking web site for your business is important.  When a prospective customer does preliminary research, your web site is usually the first impression of your company and the service you provide.

Having a properly constructed web site is important as well.  Everyone gets caught up in the design, but the code underneath is just as important to the effectiveness of your web site as the way it looks.

I offer niche article advertising opportunities on a local web site that I publish.  As a result, I spend a lot of time contacting businesses that are in the particular niche that I happen to be focusing on at the time.

In the process of researching a particular industry, I saw a Google Ad for a business in the niche.  It was obvious why they were running an Adwords campaign because they would never be found otherwise.

Their entire site was just images.  Not just mostly images . . . all images. There was not one thing on any of the pages that would tell the search engine what the site was about.

I’d post a link, but I didn’t bookmark it and I can’t find it.

Web Site Structure Matters

If you’re sitting there wondering, “So what?”  Search engines crawl text.  An image to a search engine is like a painting to a blind person . . . completely irrelevant.

So remember, if it is information that you want someone to find, don’t create a pretty graphic and put it up on your web site . . . put the text up and use CSS to make it look pretty.

If your web site is not getting the results that you think you should be getting, here is a little exercise that I want you to try.  In your browser, go to View => Source (Page Source for Firefox).   Look through the page that comes up and see if it is easy for you to tell what your site is about.

If not, then it might be a good ideal to do a web site overhaul.