The Cold Truth: A Basic Website May Not Cut It Anymore

Believe it or not, a basic website just may not cut it anymore. The days are coming to an end where you can simply pay $9.99 a month for a website builder and $99 a month for an SEO package and expect to get anywhere online. While this may have been possible in the past, Google has been rolling out many updates that are putting an end to this.

Previous to mid-2011 you were allowed to have a simple design with clear content, hire an outsourced foreign team to build a few back-links, and watch your website steadily increase in the rankings. I’m here to tell you this simply doesn’t work anymore. Why? Think about it. There are just too many people doing it. For any niche you can think of there are thousands of webmasters attempting to spam their way to the top. Google has gotten smarter. Many SEO professionals have almost no background in what really matters – user experience.

Google’s first version of what they called Panda was released around April of 2011 with the focus on ranking websites based which websites are better than others. They do this by analyzing several different aspects of both your website and the way that visitors perceive your website. Since the first Panda release there have been several updates to the system because they like the way it’s working. Here are a few aspects of what it takes to have a high ranking website in 2012:

1. A modern, intuitive design – You may think I’m just trying to sell you on a custom-designed website by us here, but in reality it’s what is needed. The reason for this isn’t simply so that you can brag to your friends about how cool it looks and how many objects slide and move across the screen. Instead, you need an intuitive design so that users don’t bounce off your site because they think it’s spam, which brings me to my next point.
2. An ongoing, analytical optimization process – Google now ranks websites partially on bounce rate. The bounce rate of a website is the percentage of users who come to your site, decide it looks like spam or that it’s irrelevant, and bounce back out. Part of the way to influence this is by your design. Does it look like it was built in 2002? Are their ads on the top half of the page that make users have to scroll far down to see your content? By reviewing analytical statistics about your site and optimizing the user experience as a whole Google will start to place your website into the category of those who like your site, which is what they are increasingly placing importance on.
3. Natural, high quality back-linking – In addition to the quality of your website and how users perceive it, Google’s Panda update is now much better at weeding out low quality back-links. You can no longer higher foreign link builders who don’t write acceptable English. You can also no longer use automated back-linking software that spins your content and publishes thousands of slightly different articles based on synonyms. The SEO industry is quickly learning that the new Google is easily able to differentiate content written quickly for SEO versus informative and useful content.

2012 to SEO experts is being hailed as the search engine revolution. For the first time in history, a web design team that builds a total user experience is becoming increasingly important if you want high rankings in Google. This is separating SEO experts with no in-depth design/development experience from those who provide total website strategy which brings websites to the top of the rankings. Luckily, Web2Studios is (and has always been) in the latter category. Contact us today to learn more.