Home: Message List - Buying Links & Pay Per Click Advertising

Re: Buying Links & Pay Per Click Advertising

NatOnline — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 18:53:45 GMT

I agree with some of your comments, not all

I wish some day if my business produce the same number of orders since the 3 last months to re-design my site, then I will give my green light for coding priority and particulary css layout, with a new friendly system cart.

Our site come from a template as we wanted to minimize the starting cost, then developped the template step by step. Today there is not much from the original template, and like you mentionned, the javascript nav top come from the original.

We are using 3 dynamic modules and we cannot switch in Html code, and need to run ASP code. The template originally was not made for urls SEO friendly, some update of the system cart code was modified to allow and create friendly urls as you can see now,

I am aware that this template is not the best and put the SEO effort in some ways to bypass this problem for now.

Before to re-design our site we need to complete our line of products, and remove the products discontinued, not popular, etc...so we can start a new clean site.

It is very hard to find a system cart SEO friendly for ASP with more possibilities to customize. The website design is very important, but for e-commerce it's not all.

Since the start up we are learning every day, and now we've got an idea of what we need for the next site.

I believe there are different steps to acheive a decent business online:

1) The design
2) The SEO/code etc...
3) Contents
4) Links building
5) Products
6) System cart

Once these 6 steps are done except for link building, products and some SEO that need to be ajusted from time to time, you should run your business pretty well.

Re: Buying Links & Pay Per Click Advertising

MTCreations — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 16:23:16 GMT

Google doesn't need clean code - they rule the world (grin!)

Gee, I wish I could charge $250/hr for my services. That seems extreme, and on the very high absurd end of the market. (for the record, my hourly is around $75/).

Links are indeed crucial as well, but again, not the only ingredient. And my new website doesn't have a lot of incoming links, as it's new (LOL), but already I've achieved several dozen top-10 rankings.

All parts of the soup, and all interplay to boost rankings.

As for your website, I may not agree with all the coding decisions, but I do see a lot of effort is put into the navigation, flow and layout, and some good SE work on titles and content. I am glad you are doing well in the SE race. (consider moving the embedded styles and javascript into external files, bring the content that much closer to the top of page).

Re: Buying Links & Pay Per Click Advertising

NatOnline — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 16:12:28 GMT

This is funny because even Google doesn't have a clean code. I agree that a clean coded website will be faster to dowload, easy to manipulate for maintenance etc...

For SEO, website coded manually will not give you more power because Google is based on vote links (PR). It doesn't mean only links don't get me wrong.

The cost for manual coding by an expert is $250 oe more per hour, so if I want my site manually coded it will cost me thousands dollars just for eventually a little plus in SEO? and I am not sure about that.

No it doesn't worth it, sorry my friend. Since the search engines can crawl my pages correctly I don't care.

Re: CSS is not a SEO silver bullet...

LUCKIEST — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 15:43:40 GMT

I see great interaction, not wild assumptions or axe-grinding.
Maybe it is the difference between East Coast thinking and West Coast thinking.
LUCKIEST

Re: CSS is not a SEO silver bullet...

MTCreations — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 15:32:16 GMT

SEO is a recipe of many ingredients - and great, interesting and informative content is at the top of the list.

But if you take the same content, and build 2 websites - one with old style tables and bad formatting, and the other with clean coding and CSS styling, the CSS-based website will most likely do better in the rankings, as the content will be easier to index and less buried.

Proper coding also means title, desc and header tags working together, which is another big ingredient in SE friendly pages.

Let's all pay attention to what's being written, and not wild assumptions or axe-grinding, OK?

CSS is not a SEO silver bullet...

patkins — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 07:37:26 GMT

I wish CSS was the end-all for good SEO but you are wrong, oh so very wrong!

There are many very well documented sites that are built with Generated
code from something like a Content Management System (CMS). In many of
these cases the code is not perfect and all using nice pretty CSS
markup. "Don't get me wrong I'm a huge fan of CSS" BUT, that is not
what makes SEO tick.

I find that anyone who sells that notion is trying to sell a service. Good SEO comes in many formats and techniques.

Unless you can put somthing in writing that your CSS will always get
the ranking the customers want you may want to be a little less
definitive.

Cheers,
-p

Re: Buying Links & Pay Per Click Advertising

MTCreations — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 07:06:25 GMT

CSS is not quite as old as 10 years - since browser support in the early years was 'flugy' (a technical term - grin).

It's probably closer to 4-5 years that the browsers now support most of the CSS standard. IE6 is a bas*ard, IE7 better, and I beleive IE8 just passed the 'acid' test (gold standard) of CSS support. Firefox 3 did so as well. Opera has for a while.

The issue is, it's far easier to 'start' a web page in tables. I admit that. And CSS is not easy to learn (formatting easy; positioning/layout not so much).

Also, most WYSIWYG html editors still spew forth table structure, and embed styles into the page (instead of in a separate CSS file), so the DIY crowd is using tables without even knowing what's under the hood.

The ramp up time to become effective in CSS is too hard for many so called webdev firms, so they stick with the 'tried and true'. But if you get over the hump, as I did, you do actually get faster than the old way.

Mike

Re: Buying Links & Pay Per Click Advertising

Lighthouse24 — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 06:57:28 GMT

No, Mike, I'm not doubting the merits of CSS vs. tables at all, nor suggesting that a professional developer would charge more (short or long term) for CSS. All I said was that cost is probably the obstacle that prevents many business owners from obtaining the kind of "proper coding" you described. (CSS is the superior presentation approach and has been around for about ten years, yet how many websites are still table based? Around 95% is the figure I keep seeing. If cost isn't the barrier, I'm wondering what is?)

Re: Buying Links & Pay Per Click Advertising

MTCreations — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 06:33:12 GMT

If you mean it takes the oldskool DIY crowd longer to create proper CSS/structure, then OK, time=money, and it can take longer to achieve proper results. (esp if they're stuck in table mode thinking)

But if you say it costs more to develop in CSS than tables for a professional webdev firm, then I completely disagree with you. I find myself able to move about 30% faster on a project, since I can use the structure of well-formed CSS and base files across projects, and change the design as needed.

I also find maintenance to be a snap, as I don't have to wade through tables/tr/td/p/font layers to get to content, make an update or two, and get out again.

Proper coding saves money, up front and over time.

Re: Buying Links & Pay Per Click Advertising

Lighthouse24 — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 06:26:37 GMT

Downside? Development cost, it would seem (at least for many business owners in this community).