The world is changing. Fast. What used to work does not seem to be effective any more and not grasping this can cost a business a lot of money.

Let me explain. Five years ago we still used the Yellow Pages to look up a business. Now most of us reach for Google, the Yellow Pages propping up our computer monitor while Yellow (the corporation) post eye watering losses. The search giant Google has gained a foothold in all our lives, not least the lives of our businesses.

When your customer Googles you, only half remembering your business name or putting in what sketchy details they can hurriedly think of - do you come up in the search? Because if you don't your competitors will. Those who are more tech savvy and have employed good SEO techniques in their websites, (or a good SEO consultant,) will come up ahead.

I'm amazed to find a lot of businesses don't give their websites much attention, they don't want to spend the money. To me, that's crazy. It's like spending a million dollars on a fabulous building - except the front door is a tatty old wooden thing with a hand written sign tacked to it saying "Go Away".

I look at web stats every day. It's part of my job and having a head for patterns in numbers and geeky stuff like that, I look for the story behind the numbers. How many visitors didn't bother to go past the front page? How long did people linger? This is the feedback a business owner needs to have at their fingertips. How many of those visits are converting to sales? What do people use the website for? All grist to the mill. A website is not a static thing, it needs adjusting to suit the changing winds of the market.

If you are feeling lost by all the technological changes, for goodness sake get a consultant who can help you! There are a few of us out here :-)

I'm going to have a little rant here, so put on your rain-hats, bring out the popcorn and listen up!

The website industry here in New Zealand seems to have very little (make that no) regulation and anyone can set themselves up as a website designer. Apparently there is an association, but I'm not overly impressed with their website - so a bit hard to take seriously. I see many people with website woes in the course of my business. I'm pleased to say that I have brought about positive results for the people who have had the good taste to come on board with me. OK enough of me.

These poor people have usually been sold websites by salespeople that talk a good talk, and because the majority of people don't really understand what's involved with a website they don't realise something is amiss until much later.

There are 3 parts to a website - whats seen, the functional bits, and whats unseen - the code.

Websites that suck - visually
Well, of course these are the easiest to spot. They look cheap, they are made from templates, or made 6 years ago, the colours clash, the links have underlines and are blue, all caps everywhere - you get the idea. You can tell these websites are bad for business by looking at the statistics - a 100% bounce rate is a dead giveaway. People click in, shudder, and click away as fast as possible. If you are trying to sell things on line you need a good looking site - or people just won't buy. If you want people to take your business seriously you need a good looking website.

The Non-functioning Suckiness
I have seen an awful lot of websites that have broken links, the navigation is confusing and leads to dead ends, and links that lead to the good old 404 message. BTW 404 messages are bad for your SEO - they all get recorded by the little googlebots that index everything. I have seen a number of websites (and I'm not going to mention names here) whose broken links lead back to the website designer. I cry foul at that one. Nice way to get inbound links guys. I'd be pretty mad if I was your client though.

The Suck That is Not Seen
Now this is the stuff that makes your website come up on page 652 of a Google search. Bad coding. And boy do I see a lot of this stuff. You need to keep your website up to date as things change out there in Cyberland. There are Standards - the W3 Consortium was formed to sort out standards for html and css etc (I'm over simplifying here - not writing a thesis) and there are basic things a website needs - a DOCTYPE declaration for starters. (you can Google any of this stuff to find out more) It needs to say what type of webpage this is. Things change, for example HTML5 is now coming into effect, so you need to make sure all the necessary code is still valid to current standards. Now some page errors are a little less serious than others, for example writing code in capitals is now not ok. But when you have errors around your DOCTYPE declaration it's not a good thing. I have seen some corkers lately. I encourage anyone to run their website through the W3 validator tool that will tell you what sort of errors your website has.

No-one knows for sure what the algorithms are that Google uses to get a website to page Number One - they guard their secret to prevent people 'gaming' their system, but one thing is sure, badly written code, missing pages and dead links and a very high bounce rate are all factors that will impact negatively.

Paying less for a website will ultimately cost you, lets be careful out there.

The purpose of a website is not be be found on search engines, but without being seen there isn't a lot of point is there? Paradoxically the more that people try and 'game' the search engine pot of gold the more they are at risk of being penalised by Google. I have been reading about the blacklisting that can happen to websites who's webmasters resort to 'dirty tricks' such as keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is, just like it sounds, a method of stuffing lots of keywords into the code that don't form part of the content of the site. Affiliate adverting is another practice that Google dislikes strongly. (You may have seen the adverts - to get rich quick, work from home on your computer ...etc - don't go there!)

There are other 'tricks' that Google doesn't take kindly to, like link farms - sites which are just a huge list of links. It's not a good idea to get linked on one of those sites as you can be judged by the company you keep, as it were.

There are a lot of sensible things one can do to improve your websites visibility, however, without falling foul of the all seeing, all knowing 'eye in the sky'. Keeping your content clear and concise with the searchable keywords scattered prudently and infrequently through your text is one, and keeping it relevant to what your website is about. Putting 'Michael Jackson' in the text simply because it's a newsworthy topic that is likely to be searched is probably not going to do a lot of good. Not using pictures as links is another handy tip. The bots that crawl the web don't read the links in pictures, so put your link before the picture.

So the next philisophical question is: If a website has a video of a tree falling in the forest, and Google doesn't find it, does it still exist?